tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58504030013924565162015-07-16T12:55:56.219-07:00Geek Versus GuitarA Geek. A Guitar. You've Been Warned.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.comBlogger103125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-38520196263220158792014-03-28T11:52:00.000-07:002014-03-28T13:19:55.069-07:00SpinTunes 8 Round 4 Rankings and Reviews<p>So, the process is a little different for this round: the finalists are ranked by popular vote and the vote of previous contestants. So I'm off the hook, a bit, for trying to decide which song of the final four is the best. I still need to write reviews, and I will rank the four. There are also twelve shadows this round, including <i>five</i> by the Boffo Yux Dudes. Wow.</p> <p>The challenge this time was interesting: the contestants were required to use a simple I-V-vi-IV chord progression, and to write about physical pain.</p> <p>Just a quick note of thanks before the reviews. This was a very enjoyable SpinTunes for me. I've been very impressed by the way every contest seems to result in better and better work. Good job, everyone! I hope I can be involved in the next one too, in some capacity. It's just too much fun not to be part of it.</p> <p>1. Jenny Katz, Clear</p> <p>Very few songs ever submitted to any round of SpinTunes or the old Song Fu contests have had the ability to make me sob like a little baby. Jenny Katz can do it. These lyrics are gorgeous and moving. They could apply to a wounded soldier, a loved one dying of cancer, or various other scenarios, and so have a universal feel. Lines like "traitor hope has left us wary" make me shiver. A great vocal performance, and a beautiful doubled guitar part. Just beautiful.</p> <p>2. Edric Haleen featuring Heather Zink, I Wanna Go Dancing</p> <p>I could quibble about "physical pain" -- yeah, I know very well that emotional pain can <i>cause</i> physical pain; I've certainly been there, so I guess it's OK. But this is a really lovely synth-pop song. Edric really put on a very different style for this and I'm impressed. Heather's vocal performance is sweet and light, although, I hate to say it, just a little pitchy on some of the verses (this may be partly because I'm just so used to hearing auto-tuned vocals on pop tracks). The instrument sounds are a little canned, but not bad. There are some original but very poppish and fun rhymes, like "I wanna go dancing / I wanna get lost in the noise / Be surrounded by boys / Who aren’t anything like you." Nicely done.</p> <p>3. Ryan M. Brewer, Christ Speaks</p> <p>This is impeccably produced but I find myself with some reservations about the way it toys with the subject matter. Can you use the crucifixion as a metaphor for being the one in the relationship that took the brunt of the pain when it ended? Well, of course you <i>can</i>, but I have to ask myself, should you? It's a bold choice but I can't help but feel it's a little off-putting. There are some other ways to interpret it, like a literal Jesus who is talking to his actual lover as he goes to his death, but that's even more provocative and also a little off-putting. So, nicely done, but this lyric just doesn't quite work well for me. I'm not offended per se; I'm a big fan of The Last Temptation of Christ, but I just feel like I can't quite click with the song. If it's going to take on such a provocative idea, it seems like it should take it a little more seriously.</p> <p>4. Jutze, The Bleeding Dragon</p> <p>Oh, cool! Wow! Nice music -- yet another different musical style by the incredibly versatile Jutze... wait... what is this song about? Wow, that's dark... happy but sad... wait... what? WHAT? Jutze! WTF! LOL! hahaha ewwww gross hahaha wow...</p> <p>Shadows -- as time and inspiration allows, I will add brief comments on the shadows.</p> <p>Glen Raphael, Hangnail (Shadow)</p> <p>A piece of effective, but completely deadpan humor. Aside from a little looseness in the backing vocals and the guitars towards the end, it is really quite musically lovely, too.</p> <p>Dr. Lindyke, Relief (Shadow)</p> <p>The vinyl record sound effects and tinny recording are interesting -- is this supposed to sound like an early blues recording? I'm not quite sure what it is channeling. I like the vocal performance, though.</p> <p>Caravan Ray, Pain (Shadow)</p> <p>Not a bad tune, a bit like a live jam, but doesn't really stick with me.</p> <p>Zoe Gray, Apologize (Shadow)</p> <p>Musically this is very clever and enjoyable. The lyrics leave me a little confused. I don't think this is about physical pain? Maybe in the sense that Edric's song is about physical pain, but then it gets a bit graphic, which doesn't entirely make sense for me.</p> <p>Jailhouse Payback, Back Pain (Shadow)</p> <p>A fun jam. There's something going on with the lyrics but I think I may be too tired and spaced out to get it just now.</p> <p>Red Watcher, Change (Shadow)</p> <p>This is really beautiful, musically. The lyrics seem like they are more about the metaphorical pain of change than physical pain.</p> <p>Boffo Yux Dudes, Is there a Doctor in the House? (Shadow)</p> <p>Took me a moment to get what this one was about. Very clever. I suppose regeneration does involve physical pain! I like the way it borrows just a couple of notes from the Doctor Who theme music, and a vintage synthesizer waveform.</p> <p>Boffo Yux Dudes, I'm in Love with the Pain that you Give (Shadow)</p> <p>This sounds like a Tom Lehrer song. Is Dave singing with the Dudes?</p> <p>Boffo Yux Dudes, Pain (Shadow)</p> <p>Erm. Not their finest work. The music is nice.</p> <p>Boffo Yux Dudes with TC Elliot, Put the Hammer Down (Shadow)</p> <p>Musically, a very enjoyable song. The joke in the lyrics is just a bit one-note though.</p> <p>Boffo Yux Dudes, Window Pain (Shadow)</p> <p>Sounds very nice. I'm going to call this one "WHEN HOMONYMS ATTACK!" Too long.</p> <p>Dr. Lindyke, Gotta Pee (Parody) (Shadow)</p> <p>Very nice... I was laughing so hard I almost... well, you get the idea.</p>Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-10256377841550204872014-03-14T14:30:00.000-07:002014-03-14T14:30:31.970-07:00SpinTunes 8 Round 3 Rankings and Reviews<p>So, onward. The number of tracks is going down and so the pressure on the judges is going up! I've been listening to the album this week and procrastinating about actually ranking the songs because it is tooth-grindingly stressful to me -- the quality of these songs is really quite high all around, and I hate to have to think that I will be helping make someone go home sad. But I signed up, so there's nothing to do for it except call 'em like I hear 'em to the best of my ability. So... in order from best-rated on down:</p> <p>1. Ryan Brewer, Jesus Christ's Biographer Gives a Guest Lecture</p> <p>Ryan gets my vote for best song of the round. It stands out from the pack here for several reasons: the lyric is sophisticated, funny, subtle, and occasionally dark and chill-inducing; the vocal and musical performances are terrific; the mix and mastering job is beautiful. It has just a bit of the tone and mood of the song "One of Us" recorded by Joan Osborne. It's also almost five minutes long, but impressively, it doesn't drag at all, no portion of it feels too repetitive, and it ends at just the right moment.</p> <p>2. Dr. Lindyke, A Historical Account of the Life and Accomplishments of Abraham Lincoln of Which Every Word is True I Swear</p> <p>A rambling blues ballad by Dr. Lindyke? Yes, please! I think this is my favorite Dr. Lindyke song of all time. I love what Dave and Denise did with the vocal performance. The lyric is funny and a little dark, and can be taken as a serious comment on the tendency towards historical revisionism about the Civil War, with some great near-rhymes and striking turns of phrase. I wish I had been able to try recording a guitar track or two for this song! The main rhythm guitar part is a little repetitive and doesn't _quite_ have a convincing blues guitar tone. The mix feels just a bit rough, and it's just a touch long. Maybe taking out the "tar baby" lines and condensing the last three long verses into two might help.</p> <p>3. Felix Frost, Cloudy</p> <p>This is my favorite F. F. song to date. The band-in-a-box accompaniment sound goes really well with a more upbeat and bouncy vocal performance here, and the lyric is head-scratching and funny.</p> <p>4. Edric Haleen, A Brave New World</p> <p>Edric's piano-playing and singing really come together nicely on this one, and it's clearly a subject he's pretty impassioned about.</p> <p>5. Jenny Katz, Liars Cheats and Weasels</p> <p>This is really nicely done, and funny -- Jenny is being an equal-opportunity misinformer here, and the lyric brought a big smile to my face. I think there is a bit of a problem with a song like this that has such a _specific_ context: while it has hilarious relevance this week in this context, it's not actually going to be very meaningful to anyone after the fact. So I find myself dithering a little bit on whether I think it is really a good song because of that. But I'm reminded by what Peter Schickele says: if it sounds good, it is good.</p> <p>6. Jailhouse Payback, Maritime Archaeology</p> <p>The music is quite well-done, a gruesome story that sounds like it could have come out of a William Hope Hodsgon short story from a century ago. But the lyric never seems to really pop, with some weak rhymes and odd word choices, and it feels like the happy music isn't quite in alignment with the story.</p> <p>7. Jutze, Banjo (Rejected Wikipedia Edit)</p> <p>This track also brought a big smile to my face. I may have LOL'ed. I really appreciate the way that Jutze changes things up -- just last round, he had a death-metal growl on top of crunching electric guitars. The silly music actually gets really pretty in the last bit when he is singing over it. But overall the song just doesn't have much meat to it, so the replay value is a little thin.</p> <p>8. Zoe Gray, The Truth About Homeschooling</p> <p>I wish I had been homeschooled! Fortunately my kids are, at least partly. This is funny and mostly terrific. There are some lines that don't really jump, and the piano part is a bit rough here and there, and just doesn't feel like it has enough variation to it.</p> <p>9. Governing Dynamics, Because</p> <p>It sounds like a certain Travis has been watching the History Channel. This song is a little frustrating because the music is really nicely put-together, with quite a complex mix with a lot of stuff in it, but it seems to suffer a bit from an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink effect, and doesn't seem to really come together for me this round.</p> <p>10. Adam Sakellarides, Why the Sky is Blue</p> <p>Good things about this song: I like the fast guitar rhythm part and the percussion; I like the blend of backing vocals. It's funny. But Adam's voice is a little pitchy and the song as a whole doesn't seem to land on a good hook.</p> <p>11. Ross Durand, How to Write a Hit Song</p> <p>I love hearing Ross rap. This is quite funny and very misinformative. His specimen chord progression and melody is definitely a counterexample of some sort. A bold effort but musically, the whole thing just doesn't work that well for me, and I can't really just take the whole thing ironically and still enjoy it that much. I can't believe I'm ranking Ross so low. Sorry, Ross.</p> <p>Shadows</p> <p>Trader Jack, Free Your Credit.com (M. A. C. D.)</p> <p>This is definitely a piece of misinformation! I found it quite hilarious. The music and mix is a little rough, but the idea really has potential... or something...</p> <p>Menage a Tune, A Simple Set of Rules</p> <p>This is a "filk" song, something that would be sung at a con. I like the concept of writing a song based on a very funny scene in an old Star Trek episode. This needs some real editing to make it flow better, with more clearly delineated verses and choruses.</p>Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-19482704655481597582014-02-27T11:44:00.001-08:002014-02-27T11:44:27.233-08:00SpinTunes 8 Round 2 Rankings and Reviews<p>I found this challenge and the variety of responses to it very interesting. Once again we had a number of songs of very high quality, which made the ranking difficult. I think that I would have found myself uncomfortable and "stretched" trying to meet this challenge myself, so I have sympathy to the contestants who met it. I also think it was a good challenge, in that it forced people to go outside their comfort zones in some cases. Most of us don't want to think of ourselves as "haters" or even people who occasionally indulge in hate when provoked, and so contestants found a variety of ways to take the challenge and turn it: it became about self-hate, it was about hating humorously, or hating someone for impersonal reasons, or hating one's own weakness, or hating one's own inability not to hate(!)</p> <p>There were a couple of songs which the judges felt did not express any form of hatred and therefore did not adequately meet the challenge. Personally I tried to keep quite a loose definition of hate, but I still just could not find "hate" expressed at all in three of the songs. At the time of writing, I don't think the final decisions as to disqualifications have been announced. I think Spin is going to edit our final rankings to reflect the DQ'ed songs.</p> <p>Anyway, assuming that all made some sort of sense, or even if it didn't (I've been drinking rather enormous amounts of coffee here in my cube in the midst of a blizzard), here are my reviews, ranked from best to worst, followed by the shadows.</p> <p>1. Jenny Katz, Voodoo Doll</p> <p>This is the finest song of the round. It represents the best of what SpinTunes is all about. It is simply gorgeous song, plaintive but melodic, with a very fine lyric. The lyric is a marvel. It is absolutely free of excessive sentimentality, cliched images, or hackneyed rhymes. The vocal performance is lovely, emotive without being overwrought, tuneful without being flashy. The instrumental accompaniment is tasteful and uses very well-chosen chords. I'm impressed with the song in every single respect. It conveys a very "adult" mood of introspection and self-criticism, but without seeming excessively precious or narcissistic. It reminds me quite strongly of song such as Joni Mitchell's "Blue Hotel Room." If I had to be ultra-picky, I'd point to an occasional imperfectly muted string in the guitar part, but that's really barely noticeable; I just mention it by way of "constructive criticism," since I wanted to find something that I felt could be improved.</p> <p>2. Ryan Brewer, Fear [of Failure] and [Self] Loathing in Las Vegas</p> <p>I really enjoyed the darker mood of this song, damning the antagonist with faint praise. I'm not usually a big fan of what passes for country music these days, but the pulsing bass line and vocal style reminded me of some of the great country-rock acts of the 1970s, tracks such as "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." This song has a tremendously enjoyable voice performance and I really like the way it is doubled; the instruments are very well-done as well, especially the ear-candy bits of backing keyboard. The drums are a little artificial-sounding and monotonous in places, such as the pinging cymbal during the bridge. When the song gets to the portion that is sung in a round, "there's a part of me that hates part of me," I'm completely hooked, and then it checks out at the perfect moment. Nicely done in all respects.</p> <p>3. Ross Durand, Sometimes</p> <p>This is a very appealing song. Ross is continuing to demonstrate that he's an old pro at this. The lyrics make it clear that the hate is a transmuted sense of loss, and that gives it a little more emotional weight. There are some great lines, like "set 'em on fire, just to watch you burn." The vocal performance is just a touch too loose with pitch here and there. The backing organ sound is gorgeous and lifts the song up very subtly from the background, reminding me of "A Whiter Shade of Pale."</p> <p>4. TurboShandy, Stoic</p> <p>This is a nicely recorded song with a great vocal performance and excellent use of harmonica. In mood, you might call it a happysad song, or a happyangry song. The layered nasal vocals against the chugging acoustic guitar lines move the song along very well. The howling hound at the very end is a nice touch.</p> <p>5. Sara Parsons, Who Am I Kidding?</p> <p>Parsons is doing something very nice with the vocal harmonies here and I love the way the song kicks off the vocal just a beat or two into the song, without an extensive intro, and the cold end works really well too. The lyrics feel a little abstract to me, not conveying a definitive story or set of images, and so I'm not really feeling the hate in any form I can recognize.</p> <p>6. Dr. Lindyke, I Hate Myself For Loving You</p> <p>This song grew on me the more I listened to it. The musical layers are roughly recorded but nicely done in a tango style, and there are some bits of ear candy like the triangle that add interest to the instruments. While the vocal performance is very fine, the vocal track leaves something to be desired -- besides boxiness, I hear compression artifacts, like this was recorded over Skype. The way the lyrics are structured and set to music, as far as rhyme and rhythm scheme, is very nicely done, but the lyric feels a little under-done, with a narrator who is a bit muddled. I'm reminded a bit of Portishead's song "Sour Times," because of the lo-fi sound of the track.</p> <p>7. Governing Dynamics, Trump Card</p> <p>This is moody even by Governing Dynamics standards. The lyrics suggest an elaborate back-story here, but it feels at times like a personal story that isn't adequately explained in the song, except for bits and pieces where the lyric really breaks through and becomes universal, in lines.like "a finger on the pulses of frivolity and vanity and greed." It conveys a lot of convincing angst, but there isn't quite enough of an arc -- that is, it starts angry and stays angry. The song drags a bit in the last third or so but ends nicely, and we get one of Travis's trademark mournful guitar solos, with some gorgeous effects strangling the life out of the tone and making it very fitting to the mood of the song.</p> <p>8. Felix Frost, Steely</p> <p>As soon as I heard those challenging chords in the somewhat long introduction, I knew I was hearing Felix Frost again. F.F. pulls out all the technical stops, creating a complex tapestry of tracks here, and I like his grotesque, angry word choices in the lyrics. I have a reservation, though: it sounds like there's a complicated backstory going on here, about a boss or former business partner, but I feel like I'm not sufficiently privy to this story to understand it emotionally. I think it's a bit of a problem when a lyric is too personal to the author and doesn't succeed in telling enough of a story to engage the listener. As in the last challenge, I feel like F.F.'s style can be, well, a little emotionally chilly, and leaves me feeling a little indifferent to the narrator.</p> <p>9. Caravan Ray, Disdain in the Refrain</p> <p>The lyrics here are hilarious, even borrowing a phrase from the challenge and then running with it. The bass line is a lot of fun. I have some very slight quibbles with the backing vocals here and there (the first "dance behind your hearse" sounds a half-step flat to me). The rhythm guitar work is excellent the whole song has such a bouncy ska feel and infectious energy; I'd call it not happysad but happymad. The tracks and mix could use some punching up with EQ and compression. I have some minor gripes about the way the percussion feels over-emphasized throughout the track, particularly that ringing ride cymbal sound that the song ends on -- it doesn't sound quite in key and right for the track.</p> <p>10. Jutze, I Hate You</p> <p>Jutze pitches his voice to sound like Cookie Monster and brings the layered, crunching metal guitars. The lyrics are quite funny and the narrator found a good reason to comically hate someone -- the person putting him through his hoops in writing the song! A really enjoyable bit of half-serious homage/mockery of the "black metal" genre.</p> <p>11. Adam Sakellarides - Damn You</p> <p>A nice reveal here and we have a good take on the challenge, where it's an impersonal sort of hate towards a celebrity who is preoccupying the women in his life. The awkwardly forced rhymes made me smile, with a twist as the narrator realizes that he is actually enjoying himself more than he'd like to admit. A fun song. I'm imagining it with a wailing saxophone solo in the middle, and a video with a chorus of soccer moms in sweatshirts and yoga pants, kicking their legs in the air, singing a backing vocal part consisting entirely of ooooohhhhs and aaaaahhhhs, from the leather sofas where they've been binge-watching season two on Netflix.</p> <p>12. Edric Haleen, Born of Hate</p> <p>This definitely has a dark and relevant story about hate, and demonstrates the way that hatred destroys the person that hates. But it is so emotionally wound up, from beginning to end, that I find myself not wanting to listen again. The whole "oops, I just got shot in the chest and I'm bleeding out -- whelp, better leave voicemail for the wife" just doesn't feel convincing to me (can you get Verizon service in Kandahar? Someone will probably explain to me that yes you can, and yes this really happened, and then won't I feel like a boob...) Also, I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but I think Edric is over-using the f-word in this song, almost to the point where this deadly-serious song veers into Book of Mormon-style satire.</p> <p>13. Brian Gray, Stupid Face</p> <p>Is this another song inspired by someone's personal story about a boss or co-worker? The beat-boxing is hilarious and so are the gross lyrics, and then as if it wasn't already weird, it gets _really_ weird. I love the way Brian layered the vocal parts, despite a mix that could use some punching-up. But ultimately there isn't all that much substance to this song.</p> <p>14. James Young, I Hate You</p> <p>A fairly simple take on the song, with a twist in that the person receiving the hate doesn't seem to be emotionally deep enough to understand or care. A soaring guitar solo can't entirely compensate for the weakness of the lyrics, with forced rhymes that don't quite work (rhyming "problem" with "autumn," for example). There are some strange popping artifacts on the lead vocal track. The recording sounds band-limited and a little tinny. The tracks could use a good compressor and the final mix could use a good mastering job.</p> <p>15. Army Defense, What Can I Do</p> <p>There's some really nice instrumentation here -- it sounds good, especially the doubled guitar tracks and keyboards, but it's hard to get a handle on the story and it doesn't convey a strong impression of some sort of hate. The vocal performance is quite good, although there are some odd artifacts (auto-tune gone wrong?) While I like the lyrics, I think overall there are too few lyrics, even for a short song, which makes it feel like it emphasizes musical style over meaning too much. The vintage keyboard sounds towards the end of the song are cool but at that point it is getting a little over-complicated, sort of a musical everything-including-the-kitchen sink.</p> <p>16. Zoe Gray -- Black with You</p> <p>The bridge really makes this song; the rest of it feels a little too long, repetitive and one-note by comparison. I feel like I understand what the lyric is getting at, but the phrase "fallen into black with you" just doesn't quite seem like it is going to take off as a catch-phrase. Maybe it works better in a different language, like the way "we will bury you" makes more sense in Russian?</p> <p>17. T.C. Elliott - You Cheated On Me</p> <p>Serviceable but a little drab, with some bad rhymes (heart of glass, alibi). Competently done but doesn't really break ground.</p> <p>18. Jailhouse Payback, Clippedcorners</p> <p>Musically, this song is beautiful. I love the use of the banjo here, and there seems to be a story implied, but I was not able to discern what it was about. I can't detect any sort of coherent mood of hate in the lyric or music. Is the antagonist dead? Has the protagonist forgiven him, or not? Is this a song about a song? It all comes off a little frustratingly vague. There really nice instrumental backing, especially towards the end, although overall the song is just a touch too long (the banjo riff is very nice, so let's play it over... and over...)</p> ----------- <p>Heather Miller, You Make Me</p> <p>A hate song about winter personified! As I'm writing this, it is supposed to hit sixteen below zero in Saginaw this evening and I nearly slid off the road driving in blizzard conditions. Yesterday as I came in to the office for a meeting I noticed that my knuckles were bright red and nearly bleeding where the skin had nearly split, just due to the extreme cold and dryness. This song has really fun lyrics and a nice sultry vocal performance, with a bass line that propels the song along. The guitar line tends to drift off the beat here and there. If it had been in the running, it would have been towards the top of the rating.</p> <p>T. C. Elliott, The Kitchen Table</p> <p>Some funny lyrics and a lot of anger, but there's not much to it beyond a contrived storyline and general feeling of misogyny. The timing drifts somewhat aimlessly against a canned drum track.</p> <p>Menage a Tune, Wevenge</p> <p>I think this would work perfectly as an animated children's video if the narrator's performance were much more over-the-top, and the quoted bits were actually in Mel Blanc's voice. That would present some copyright issues. The emotional tone of this song seems muddled -- it features real death in a way that the cartoons never did. Remember, kids, meat is murder! Overall it is pretty amusing, but towards the end the overlaid second keyboard part seems to wander off track in a few places.</p> <p>Boffo Yux Dudes, Suitcase Full of Hate</p> <p>This sounds like something very different from the BYD. I like the music track. Some very amusing rhymes. It sounds kind of like the Dickies, Ramones, or a similar early punk group. This one would have been mid-pack if it was in the official running.</p> <p>@suspiciousden, to dust</p> <p>This tune sounds like it should be performed in the background of a David Lynch movie, on an glowing, antique console radio set. A very nice mood is established and maintained through the whole song, with a beautiful vocal. It reminds me a little bit of the last track of Annie Lennox's album _Diva_. It works so much better than her round one song. I wish Denise was still in the contest!</p>Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-14431655698723699762014-02-14T23:03:00.000-08:002014-02-14T23:03:21.641-08:00SpinTunes 8 Round 1 Rankings and Reviews<p>I am judging entries for SpinTunes 8. There are two basic requirements for a judge: I'm supposed to provide some sort of review for each song, and I'm also supposed to rank them in order from best to worst. The review part comes naturally to me; the ranking is a bit harder.</p> <p>I find it especially hard to explain my criteria at ranking. I'll take a quick shot at it. Every day this week, I've listened to the whole album (almost two hours) Starting day three, I started making notes as things occurred to me while I was listening, and I've also come to remember the songs and I know which ones I'm interested in hearing again, and which ones I wish I could skip over (although I'm not actually skipping over any).</p> <p>What makes me want to hear a song again? Well, first, lyrics that interest me and move me, and especially lyrics that don't make me wince because they use easy, cliched rhymes or phrases. (In 2014 you can only rhyme "moon" with "June" if you are doing it ironically). I appreciate clever wordplay and a song that tells or at least implies a real human story.</p> <p>Then there's vocal performance. I don't expect perfection. Lord knows I don't achieve it in my own songs. I can be moved by a singer who isn't technically very good, but if you're really pitchy and your performance is not very moving, then that's a weak track as far as I'm concerned.</p> <p>Then there's the music. I like a lot of different genres, but I don't really enjoy playing that is all flash or deliberately bombastic. Keeping it short and sweet is pretty important (and yes, I know I've failed at that in some of my own songs as well). I can't give you an exact time that represents a perfect song; it depends on the song. I know when I'm listening along, I know when I _feel_ that a song should end. If the song agrees with my feeling, that seems like the right length to me. A pop song has to be unusually interesting in its structure or lyrics to keep my interest for longer than four minutes; Don McClean's _American Pie_ is 8 minutes long, but it has a truly epic lyric.</p> <p>Production counts for something too, but there's not just one kind of production I appreciate. A live track with just a singer and guitar can be just fine. So can a full multi-tracked song with all the bells and whistles.</p> <p>I will review and rank a cappella songs, but I must admit that I find these a little problematic at times. Someone like Billy Bragg can hold an audience rapt with a song like "Chile, Your Waters Run Red Through Soweto," but he doesn't do an entire show a cappella. Very few pop acts can pull off a wonderful and moving a cappella song that consists of just one singer with no accompaniment. In general, I'll rank you on whether it seems like you know what you are doing with the recording. If you can only achieve a simple live track, record a good simple live track. If you want to record 24 tracks of instruments, feel free, but they ought to be well-mixed. If it sounds like a train wreck that way, maybe you should have used a simpler arrangement based on what you can achieve technically. And yes, I've _definitely_ attempted mixes that were technically beyond me, so I have sympathy for people who are learning as they go. One last thing: if you do use instruments, they shouldn't sound completely generic. If it sounds like you just hit the "demo" button on a Casio keyboard and sang along with it, I'm not going to really appreciate the music portion of your track.</p> <p>Finally, if a song doesn't meet the challenge at all, in any sense, it would be disqualified, but subjectively, I will still rank songs on how well I think they meet the challenge. That includes whether songs take a very obvious, conventional approach, or have fun with the challenge. In this case the challenge is pretty simple. There's nothing wrong with just writing a simple song about a lost loved one. But I do appreciate the songs that took a special twist on the challenge. </p> <p>I'm not going to assign numeric fractions to these general categories because I don't really believe I can make rankings somehow more objective that way.</p> <p>All right, here we go:</p> <p>1. Ross Durand: Sitting Right Here</p> <p>This is a great take on the challenge. My stepfather suffered from an Alzheimer's-like form of dementia so this song speaks to me. The happysad approach is touching and the lyrics are powerful.</p> <p>2. Sara Parsons: Guilt</p> <p>I tried not to tip my hand too much in the listening party by making a lot of comments as I heard the songs for the first time, in part because I didn't want to praise a song in that context and then have to decide later that maybe it wasn't all that good. In the case of this song I couldn't really help myself -- I think I typed "Wow!" or something similar. This is a very strong song. The accompaniment is simple but I like the way Sara's pedal base notes (or sometimes alternating bass notes) keep a rhythm going and propel the song along. She should learn more elaborate Travis picking if possible at some point, but this works fine. The lyric is quite strong. She has a very straightforward take on the challenge but manages to avoid all traces of false sentimentality and cliche. The only real weakness I see is that the line "stroll up and down the lines" doesn't seem quite right to me, and the details of the story feel just a little unclear. But even in the listening party, even on a first hearing, this song brought tears to my eyes. Nicely done!</p> <p>3. Brian Gray: The Child I Left Behind</p> <p>Just when I was prepared to be fed up with a cappella songs, someone like Brian comes along and sings an a cappella song that is really beautifully done and moving. I appreciated in particular the use of reverb to thicken up a single voice. Brian mentions Mandy Patinkin in his song bio and I can certainly hear that. The twist on the challenge -- that the narrator misses his own younger self, his inner child, is a nice take on the idea.</p> <p>4. Caravan Ray: Missing You</p> <p>Well, you could not argue that the song doesn't meet the challenge. The arrangement is a lot of fun and the twist is the funny bitterness. I enjoyed the silly falsetto backing vocal parts. It is a short and sweet song and quite funny.</p> <p>5. Governing Dynamics: Song to Stay Awake (700 Miles)</p> <p>Travis has produced another moving and sad song. I particularly like the keyboard in this track. If I understand the story, the narrator has awakened from a dream in which he imagines that his absent girlfriend has shot herself, and he decides to jump in the car and drive to her side, whether she wants to see him or not -- although there is some real ambiguity here; maybe it's already happened, and he's just convinced himself that she is still alive? ("At one in the morning I'd reached the end / of the elaborate game of pretend.") In any case it's a beautiful lyric, and the whole song is one of the very best this round.</p> <p>6. Turboshandy: Torch Bearer</p> <p>I read Turboshandy's song bio about the very minimal and low-budget approach to recording this song. It's impressive that this was done with just an SM-58 and a couple of very basic instruments, and open source software. The simple but not simplistic lyric, a very straightforward take on the challenge, and some well-crafted lyrics, and the basic approach to melody and harmony, all make this a strong entry.</p> <p>7. Jailhouse Payback: Hey Eugene</p> <p>This is also one of my very favorite songs from this round. The mix and accompaniment are very nicely done. The vocal performance is understated but works very well. It seems like a happysad song, but then becomes an angrysad song. There's an undercurrent of bitterness to it that blends beautifully with the very upbeat music. The challenge is met adequately, although like several of the songs this round, the story feels a little hidden and vague. There's just a bit of a guitar train wreck at the end but that's only a minor distraction.</p> <p>8. Dr. Lindyke: Why</p> <p>Dave's vocal performance on this track is quite lovely and nuanced, although the harmony "aaaah" seem to be a bit off-pitch here and there. The lyrics are up to Dr. Lindyke's usual high standard. It's touching that Dave dedicated the song to RC. I've listened to this song at least five times, and I'm still a little unclear about how I feel the drums. Sometimes they seem just a little too busy to me, particularly the kicks, but then on another listen they seem just right, and they seem to keep the song propelled along. I can't quite decide. It's an interesting choice. This is one of the stronger tracks, but maybe not quite in the very top few.</p> <p>9. Jenny Katz: Secret Love Life</p> <p>Jenny's take on the challenge is one of the most positive. The song is beautifully performed and recorded, with some subtle vocal harmonies, marred only by some slight pitch trouble. I'm strongly reminded of some of my favorite chill-out dance tracks, particularly songs like "Future Love" by Presence. I was impressed by this song in the listening party, and after listening repeatedly it still sounds beautiful. The lyrics are uneven, though. Lines like "spinning like a maple seed" are gorgeous, but lines like "I know that nothing is ever gonna change" don't really make for a strong story.</p> <p>10. T.C. Elliott: Broken Mind</p> <p>I like it when a lyric can do things that are a little unexpected, with concrete details: "corner grocery or Japan" is a nice detail. Some of the rhymes like "changed/rearranged" aren't that strong. The electric guitar part is nicely done, and the acoustic breaks especially are very nice, and the rhythm has a "broken" staggering quality that fits the song well. The twist on the lyrics here is that the reason for the separation is that the narrator has "a broken mind" and I can certainly relate to that.</p> <p>11. Felix Frost: Cat's Eye</p> <p>I read the song bio with some interest. The challenge is met perfectly well, if with a strange conceit. I like what F.F. is doing with a real story, with a lot of concrete detail and very specific odd details. There's no denying that this song is very pretty. I wouldn't mark a song down because the lyrics were odd, or surreal, and this song's lyrics definitely are. The performance is not just fine but quite good. But the song is complicated, both in the imagery in the lyrics and the shifting beats and tempos. Somehow in that complexity it starts to feel a little emotionally detached, and fails to really sell the story as an emotional ride. I'm still scratching my head, but F. F. definitely gets extra points for creativity.</p> <p>12. Edric Haleen: On the Matter of Bullying (Part 3)</p> <p>The song clearly meets the challenge. In Edric's song bio he writes that "...this seemed far too aligned [with the concept of the previous parts] to consider writing any other song this round." I'm glad this challenge gave him that opportunity. It is again a very moving song and I know this is an issue Edric is passionate about. It's very nicely done technically. Edric has tied everything together in a way that feels very convincing. I feel a little bowled over, though, by the intensity of both the subject matter and the performance, and it's not entirely a comfortable feeling. I'm not sure there's an argument to be made that this subject would work with a little subtler or lighter approach, but if there is I would prefer it.</p> <p>13. The Orion Sound: Without You (A Valentine's Stalker Song)</p> <p>This is quite a thing! I'm impressed by a song that sounds like an extended piece in a musical theater production, although it isn't really that long. Musically, it is quite elaborate, and creates a real story arc. It definitely meets the challenge, and in a very creative way. The recording is a little fuzzy and distorted in parts, which is a shame, but not painfully so.</p> <p>14. James Young: Never Coming Home</p> <p>The lyric sounds boxy and that's somewhat distracting, although it's lessened because the performance is good. The twist on the challenge seems to be that it isn't entirely clear why the person in question is gone, and you never quite find out, although it does not sound like the person is dead ("your story remains untold/will you get to grow old?") I like that ambiguity. The lyrics are quite unsentimental and well-done and I always appreciate a good guitar solo. Overall the song feels just a bit long. I would not drop the instrumental ending or the guitar solo, but perhaps the verses could be tightened up.</p> <p>15. Spencer Sokol: Burdens</p> <p>A plaintive song and the lyrics have some nice parallels and interesting wording that leaves a lot of room for interpretation -- it tells a story quite elliptically. It sounds to me like the narrator is talking about several different people he's missing rather than one, so I suppose it technically meets the challenge, but not really in a strong way. There's some distracting crackling in the mix. Overall a good effort and this song reminds me of songs such as "Lightning Crashes" by Live.</p> <p>16. Jutze: Nancy (Please Don't Go)</p> <p>The lyric is very boxy and that's a bit distracting. The accompaniment tracks work fine, with a happysad approach (a very upbeat melodic figure) with sad lyrics. The twist on the challenge is that the song is a boy singing about losing his favorite teacher, which is funny and surprising.</p> <p>17. Trader Jack: Doom Dah</p> <p>I cringed when I first heard the vocal part, but it has grown on me because the narrator character is just so funny and weird. I wound up loving the creative twist on what seems like it could either be the drunken muttering of someone with a broken heart, or maybe someone having a psychotic break. It doesn't meet the challenge strongly, in my opinion, but I still enjoy it because it's just so goofy and weird, while still conveying the feeling of heartbreak.</p> <p>18. Zoe Gray: Ginger Twins</p> <p>This piano needs tuning and I have a hard time listening to an out-of-tune piano. The vocal performance is very nice. It seems to meet the challenge, although I'm not clear on the details of just who the narrator is missing -- a childhood friend? A literal twin? In any case the lyrics are still fairly strong. The song feels slightly too long, as well.</p> <p>19. Menage a Tune: The Box Feeling</p> <p>This is a 4 minute a cappella song. The lyric is a bit of a mixed bag. Rhymes like heart/apart and too/you are too easy, but other parts are better, like the way the verses end with five-syllable lines where the mood turns a bit each time. The song feels slightly too long and slightly too slow. JoAnn's vocal performance is touching if a little loose on the melody. I think the song would have been better with some simple accompaniment, because the vocal performance isn't quite powerful enough to really hold me rapt for four minutes. I did like JoAnn's twist on the challenge -- missing someone she can no longer talk to _online_. Overall this is a good effort that probably would have been better with accompaniment and a little more polishing.</p> <p>20. Taylor R: Missing You</p> <p>The raw-sounding guitar and bass here remind me strongly of Joy Division's classic track "Love Will Tear Us Apart." The lyrics have that raw feel as well. It's lacking just a little bit of something I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it's just that the mix is too low and lacks proper compression and mastering.</p> <p>21. Army Defense: Phil and Don</p> <p>I like the arrangement and the vocal performances here -- there's a lot going on. It feels like an unsettling blend of E.L.O. and Sly and the Family Stone. This song seems to meet the challenge only by the skin of its teeth, though. The narrator misses his brother who has left -- in some way. In what way is not clear. Overall the song just doesn't have enough of a story; there aren't enough lyrics. So despite the fact that I like the music a lot, and the production, and the vocal performance, it gets knocked down for feeling incomplete.</p> <p>22. Adam Sakellarides: Right Place, Wrong Time (The Time Traveller)</p> <p>This is a great twist on the challenge: the narrator can't be with his love "right now" because she's a freakin' time traveller! I love the lyric, and the vocal performance fits the mood of the song. The bass line is muddy and the piano sound is not well-done, unfortunately, especially in the solo. A good effort but just a little too rough, musically.</p> <p>23. Ominous Ride: When I Lost You</p> <p>It's unclear exactly how the narrator lost his love, but the dark music suggests that there is something dark at work. I enjoyed the lyrics and the vocal tracks but the music is a little overpowering, and some of the keyboard tracks seem to fight with the guitar slightly. The vocal performance seems like it was very good but suffered a bit from a muddy mix. At almost five minutes, the song drags a bit.</p> <p>24. Sid Brown: Who You Used to Be</p> <p>Another pretty straightforward take on the challenge. I appreciate the garage band feel of this track, and the repeating acoustic guitar figure. The vocal performance is not very strong, though.</p> <p>25. Ryan M. Brewer: Burn Out or Fade Away</p> <p>The production is very nice here -- it's an interesting combination of very real-sounding and very artificial-sounding instruments. It's just the right length. The vocal performance is very strong. But the lyrics in many places seem to be more about the rhyme and sound than the meaning, which is disappointing (what does a line like "a moneyball boiled a bastard" actually mean?) and it does not feel to me that this song meets the challenge very convincingly, so unfortunately I have to mark it down for that.</p> <p>26. The Boffo Yux Dudes: Dead Wrong</p> <p>I sigh when I see that the song is under three minutes but the lyrics don't start until 30 seconds in. The lyrics are not strong. The challenge is technically met. The lyrics don't make a whole not of sense to me; it seems to suggest a few funny twists on the words "missing you" but doesn't really jell.</p> <p>27. Hudson and Day: I Tried, Okay</p> <p>This is a very conventional take on the challenge using a very unconventional song structure. Denise often uses these very unstructured, free-form songs that ebb and flow in a very organic way. I feel like from about 1:45 to 2:10 it is starting to come together and have some beautiful harmonies, and there are some sweet sounding parts here and there, but at least to me, the song fails to really come together as a coherent whole and the looseness in this case means it doesn't build up to much of an emotional peak.</p> <p>28. Dex01: Monster</p> <p>The mix is not good: the tracks feel like they are all at the same level, over-compressed, and the mixed track is too hot and filled with clipping and crackling. The lyrical take on the challenge seems fine. The vocal performance is a little disappointing; the song seems to me like it needs more of a Violent Femmes-style sarcasm.</p> <p>29. Wait What (the Band): Without You Here</p> <p>I don't really understand who this song is for. It's too dirty for minors -- I wouldn't want to play it in front of one of my boys, because he'd run around at preschool singing "stick my dick in peanut butter" and giggling. But it seems to me that anyone older than sixteen would not think it was that funny. So is it targeted at a Junior High School audience? That's when I thought Austin Powers was funny. So, the song clearly meets the challenge. The music is nothing to write home about. The vocal performance is actually pretty good, especially the backing vocal. I just don't like the adolescent lyrics. I don't think using "negro please" as an alternative to saying "nigger" is very funny, but what do I know; my wife and kids are black, but I'm white. I don't think the narrator hoping his wife or girlfriend's "gina" is intact is that funny, given how many female soldiers are raped over there. Honestly, this lyric just wants to make as many gross jokes as possible, and Wait What, Imma let you finish, but Philip Roth wrote the best scene where a guy masturbates with food -- in his novel _Portnoy's Complaint_, in the _sixties_ -- and that book was actually banned in Australia and pulled from libraries. In 2014 it's old news and has little in the way of either shock or comedy value.</p> <p>SHADOWS -- I did not include shadows in the ranking (because I'm not supposed to). The fact that they are down here at the end doesn't mean they are "below" all the songs that are official entries. All three of these, if I ranked them with the others, would come somewhere from upper-middle to middle of the pack of songs.</p> <p>Heather Miller: Greatest Generation (Shadow)</p> <p>Sometimes simple is best. This song has quite a conventional style and structure while managing to avoid obviously cliched rhymes. It is one of the few songs that took, I think, a completely straightforward approach to the challenge. Heather's vocal performance is low-key but touching; it reminds me slightly of Stevie Nicks.</p> <p>Andy Glover: What's Making Me Sad</p> <p>This may be the most straightforward breakup song and the most basic take on the challenge in the whole bunch. It's a good effort, a basic but serviceable guitar part, and a vocal style that suits the song. Really I've got nothing to criticize, although the song also doesn't stand out strongly amidst a number of good entries.</p> <p>T. C. Elliott: Will You Run Away with Me, My Love (Shadow)</p> <p>Nice use of percussion. The guitar part feels a little busy to use as a continual backing. The vocal performance is good but not really strong. The lyrics feel a little cliched here and there (rhyming new/you), but the chorus "will you run away with me" feels very straightforward and honest, and I like that about this song. It's a straightforward take on the challenge.</p>Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-16231993711962892282013-08-14T10:04:00.002-07:002013-08-14T10:12:58.638-07:00Five More Gone<p>Yesterday I took five more guitars to Guitar Center to sell. They were <a href="http://geekversusguitar.blogspot.com/2009/05/guitar-pron-4-peavey-t-60-sunburst.html">this beautiful Peavey T-60</a>, a less photogenic and slightly older T-60 with an oil-finished ash body and rosewood fretboard, a Peavey Limited VT with a tiger's eye flame maple top, my Firenza with Duncan P-90 pickups, and my Ovation 1778T Elite with the purple, orange, yellow and green "Tribal Flame" finish.</p> <p>I also sold my Boss DD-20 digital delay and my old Digitech Talker. I tried to unload a couple of Grunge distortion pedals but they didn't want to give me more than $5 or so each for them, so I kept them. I might have use for them eventually. Guitar Center didn't want my Radial JS-3 microphone splitter, although it's a nice piece of gear, because they just don't move items like that. I also sold my matched pair of Rode NT-5 microphones.</p> <p>It's hard to get excited about selling off gear. The things gone are a load off my mind -- I don't have to store them, don't have to worry about keeping them in the proper temperature and humidity, or getting stolen, or getting broken. But some I will miss. The Limited VT is a very scarce guitar with incredible tone -- made in the Peavey custom shop in Leakesville, Mississippi, with 3 hand-wound single-coil pickups. And yet these guitars get very little respect. But the flame finish isn't my style -- it's too flashy for my taste. The T-60s are starting to become vintage and arousing interest from collectors, but although I wanted one very badly when I was about sixteen, and they are beautifully crafted guitars, built like tanks, with classic looks, I have to acknowledge that I no longer really like the way the skinny necks actually feel in my hands. The Firenza (C profile) and Ovation (soft V) and Limited (C-ish, asymmetrical, flat fingerboard) feel a lot better. The Ovation is actually kind of garish -- the finish doesn't really fit my personality all that well, especially as I get older. And while the Talker is cool, I just wasn't using it, because I haven't been performing live. All this stuff was made to be used, and it should be used more than it has been.</p> <p>Oh, I've used it all some. The Synapse fretless bass provided the bass line for several of my songs: "Polly," "I.O.U.," and "Falling." The Firenza and one of the Venus guitars were on my parody of Jonathan Coulton's "Re: Your Brains," called "Re: Your Grains." The Firenza also provided the main guitar riff for "I.O.U." The Parker Fly was the lead guitar tone for a couple of songs, most notably "War Criminal" and my cover of "Today's the Day." The Limiteds have been on various tracks going back to my early collaborations with Joe "Covenant" Lamb. The Ovation acoustic is in several of my covers and instrumentals and it always gets comments because of its flashy finish.</p> <p>Of course, it wasn't strictly necessary to have all those different instruments to chose from, to make those songs. Honestly, I had too many, and the guitar-collection-as-investment idea wasn't actually going to fly, at least not the way I put it into practice. It also fed into some of my less wholesome personality traits; it felt uncomfortably close to hoarding, and maybe a little compulsive. But it was a lot of fun, and I really liked being able to pick up a few guitars and try them out while recording a song, and let the particular feel and tone of a specific instrument tell me what to play.</p> <p>While I was waiting for the staff at Guitar Center to process all this stuff, I toyed with a few modern instruments. It mostly served to remind me of what I liked about my older instruments. While modern USA-made Stratocasters have decent fit and finish, the wood hasn't aged to that point where they resonate beautifully -- they just don't have as much tone or as much mojo as the old T-60s from 1979, or even the Limited VT, which isn't yet truly "vintage."</p> <p>What's sad about all this is that this load of gear, re-sold, won't even pay for one month's expenses. It'll cover a mortgage payment and part of a heating bill. I got out of this gear well under half of what I put into it. I might have been able to get a little more on eBay, but I just don't have that kind of time to put in. And it's just hard to get excited about being able to pay Consumer's Energy for another month.</p> <p>There are a few pieces left. I'm not guitar-less yet. There are a few more in salable condition, and then some "fixer-uppers" that might be harder to unload, which I might have to list on eBay as "project" or "parts" guitars. There's even one ukulele.</p> <p>If I have to sell almost everything -- if I only can keep one -- I'll (sadly) sell the Babicz acoustic (made in Indonesia), the USA-made Steinberger XP and the American/Canadian Godin nylon-string SA, the sparkle blue Super-Sonic, and the flame-top Peavey Limited, and keep the American flag Limited.</p> <p>I don't want to let that one go, because all the American flag guitars you see these days are made overseas, and I could never bring myself to buy one. I'll keep it in memory of a time when people like me were paid to make things here in America.</p> <p>And if I can't keep even one -- if I still don't have an income again, and we're selling off everything we possibly can just to get through the winter -- well, then God help us.</p> <p>I leave you with <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFy6OOlldC4">this</a>.</p>Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-60396806828518599742013-07-24T18:00:00.000-07:002013-07-24T18:35:58.951-07:00More Guitars Gone<p>The Parker Fly Refined Classic is gone, and the Godin LGX-SA. I also sold the Godin LG. I have now sold ten instruments. I sold my Apogee Ensemble.</p> <p>My T-60 with a maple fretboard is still up for sale at Elderly Instruments in Lansing -- see <a href="http://elderly.com/vintage/items/30U-18213.htm">this link</a>. If it sells, I will eventually get a check. If it doesn't sell in another month or so, I think they will want me to go down and get it.</p> <p>The most valuable guitars are gone now. There are some more I could sell. There are some others I probably can't sell at any price, because they need too much work, or aren't worth anything. I'm thinking that over, considering what I might keep. It's a hard choice. I'm considering Operation Rip Off the Scab, which would involve selling all but three instruments -- my favorite bass, my favorite electric guitar, and my favorite acoustic guitar. Also, some of my loose gear and pedals -- pretty much everything I might be able to get a little money for, some locally, and some on eBay. There's also Operation Guitarpocalypse, which is like Operation Rip Off the Scab, except I don't keep anything at all.</p> <p>Operation Guitarpocalypse assumes that within six months to a year I'll be able to get back into music. But what if a job still doesn't come around? My last few guitars will only net me enough to pay our energy bills and other expenses for <i>maybe</i> another two months at the outside. They won't pay the mortgage. They just keep us from sliding into debt before the end of September or October. That's no way to solve a problem, just kicking it down the road for another two months. I've played guitar on and off for almost 35 years. It's been a very important hobby to me and I've hoped to do more with music, not less-- more performing, and more recording.</p> <p>Honestly, I don't actually need a collection quite like the one I had. I had sort of a mix of goals with that -- some of them I was planning to hold and attempt to re-sell after they had appreciated in value, some were for different tones for recording, and some were honestly just because I wanted to try different kinds of instruments. The re-selling thing has not worked out. Even though I bought them used, and made lowball bids, and bought them for as cheaply as I could, mostly on eBay, I will be getting less than half of what I paid for them, on average. So I guess I mostly have to chalk it up to experience and maybe learn something from this.</p> <p>If I'm really going to play guitar, performing live or recording, I need a handful of well-chosen instruments and gear that sounds good. Is the best way to eventually get to that point to get rid of everything now, in the faith that I'll be able to set up a new studio and get some different instruments in the future -- maybe better-chosen stuff, making choices informed by my experience with the current gear and instruments? Maybe. Really, it comes down to my faith in the future -- my ability to get a good-paying job, to have a little free time and a little extra money, and to make better decisions. Dear reader, what do you think? How do you come to grips with giving up things you love? And are you feeling sanguine about your future, these days?</p>Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-12657890406854356172013-06-17T11:53:00.002-07:002013-06-23T15:01:40.084-07:00Shrinking the Guitar Collection<p>So, during this period of unemployment I have taken the opportunity to turn some instruments into money.</p> <p>Initially, I took three guitars down to Elderly Instruments in Lansing for appraisal and/or sale: a USA-made Peavey Limited, a T-60 with a maple fretboard, and a black Squier Venus. The T-60 is now on consignment, <a href="http://elderly.com/vintage/items/30U-18213.htm">up for sale on their web site now</a>. If you buy it, I should eventually get a check.</p> <p>They did not want the Limited -- in the sense that they would only offer me a very small amount of store credit for it, and no cash at all. I realized when I read their evaluation that the tech had not noticed that it was a USA-made guitar -- made in the Peavey custom shop in Leakesville. He thought it was one of the Korean EXP models. When I pointed that out, they did offer me slightly more store credit -- but I think it was still under $100. And I just had to sigh. That instrument listed at perhaps $1,200, and sold for perhaps $900, and I bought it for something around $400. It was another example of an American manufacturer who employed American craftsmen undermining the perceived value of their instruments by, basically, selling authorized knock-offs. The Limited models are respectable guitars, but no one respects them. I have a few more but I will be trying to hold on to them if I can, in the hopes that maybe they will gain some vintage value like the T-60 did -- but mainly because I like the way they sound and the way they feel to play.</p> <p>It was a similar situation with the Venus. They offered me a tiny store credit. I think it was under $75. Now that really is a guitar made overseas -- in Japan. It's not a great guitar, but it is an interesting design, of historic interest, and fun to play, with some nice tones. They just really just don't seem to want to deal with lower-end, less-vintage guitars. I guess that's understandable. But I didn't really like the way they dealt with me over the T-60. It left a bad taste in my mouth. To even put it up for consignment, they required me to pay for some work on it -- fret leveling and dressing, and setup. Since I had come all that way, I did this by trading them the Venus for enough store credit to pay them to do the setup. So it seems, essentially, as if I had to bribe them for the privilege of having them put it on consignment and (if it sells) collecting a percentage of the sale price.</p> <p>I wish I hadn't given up the Venus like that, since I could have gotten a lot more for it elsewhere. It was just another case of how my expectations have been beaten down. I set up my own instruments, and the T-60 didn't really need fret work. Yes, it had some very slight wear, but the wide jumbo Peavey frets last a lot longer than vintage-profile frets, and they weren't badly notched anywhere, and it wasn't buzzing. They make the case that they want instruments in their showroom to reflect professional setup. I'd be a lot more convinced of that if their showroom wasn't loaded with crappy new Asian guitars with sharp fret ends poking out and bad setup. So I do hope you will buy my guitar from them, but I don't think I'll be taking Elderly any more used instruments to sell. If it doesn't sell, I'll have to go back down there to pick it up.</p> <p>So that's one instrument gone, and one on consignment. I took the Limited to our local Guitar Center and got $200 in cash for it, which was not stellar -- I could have probably gotten more on eBay, but it takes a lot of time and effort to sell guitars on eBay, and I'm trying to spend my time on things more relevant to my job search.</p> <p>Since then I've taken a few more guitars to Guitar Center. I sold my Vista-series Jagmaster. It wasn't my favorite of that series -- if I ever get another of the Japanese-made Jagmaster, I want one with the truss rod access at the headstock, so I don't have to remove the neck (even partially) to adjust it. I took one of my three Super-Sonics -- a silver one. I took them one of my other Venus guitars, one of two sunburst models. I took them my Steinberger Synapse five-string fretless bass. They bought all those. I also took them a "Music Yo" era Steinberger XQ-4 fretted bass, and they passed on that, saying it seemed like it had a truss rod issue. I will have to look into that. My son was playing that one, and if he tried to adjust the truss rod without asking me, I fear the worst -- it takes some practice to learn how much force you can use. If you've never done it, you should practice on a junker!</p> <p>So my collection has shrunk by, let's see... Venus, Limited, Venus, Synapse, Jagmaster, Super-Sonic, and (if it sells) a T-60. That's six, maybe seven. The instruments I've got left tend to fall into two categories. There are a number of fixer-uppers. There's another Venus that needs some wiring work. There's another silver Super-Sonic that needs some wiring work as well. There's another T-60 that has a loose output jack. There is a broken Newburgh Steinberger bass that needs some bridge rebuild work -- probably several hundreds of dollars including shipping it off to New York. Should I bite the bullet and pay for repair work on instruments just so I can sell them? Then there are some that I really want to keep because of their quality or tone or rarity. I'm not sure how hard I should fight to hold on to them. What it comes down to is whether the money I could get for them is worth more than the value to me in having them around to play or re-sell later. Maybe it's time to only keep instruments that are really "pulling their weight" -- the ones I use to record with or play regularly.</p> <p>We'll see how long this period of unemployment lasts. My priorities could change. I feel a little lighter for having gotten rid of six of them. The broken instruments feel like a bit of a mental burden as well -- projects I keep meaning to get to. Maybe it really would be best to get them back out there, fixed up, so that someone can play them. After all, that's what they are for.</p>Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-70816964162987636262012-06-06T12:47:00.001-07:002012-06-06T12:48:17.278-07:00The Heil PR-40I purchased a used Heil PR-40 from an eBay seller to try it out and consider whether I wanted to get a couple of them in my home studio. It's a nicely-designed mic; the sound seems quite impressive; I'll test it out on a podcast. But to set it up properly, I'll need a boom, a shock mount, and a pop filter. The problem with all that is that it's approximately a $300 mic. But the shock mount costs another $100, the boom costs $120, a base for the boom costs $30, and a pop filter that mounts on the shock mount costs about $60. So there you have it -- a $300 microphone where setting it up costs as much or more than the microphone. If it works out well for podcasts, I'm considering a whole second mic and boom so I can do live broadcast-style conversations easier... but at $600 for the setup I may want to wait on that. I should clarify -- I don't believe the prices for these parts are actually that far out of line. It isn't like Neuman's $80 plastic <a href="http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/SG5/">thread adapter</a>. But it's still a little daunting.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-72552412259091555702012-03-31T18:58:00.000-07:002013-06-08T15:26:10.543-07:00The Steinberger Synapse XS-15FPA 5-String Fretless BassI have what is apparently a somewhat exotic electric bass -- so exotic that it seems no one makes strings for it. It is a 5-string fretless Synapse. I purchased this thing used in (I think) 2008. Gibson still lists the <a href="http://steinberger.com/XS15FPA.html">fretted version</a> for sale but the fretless models seem to be as rare as hen's teeth.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ByGoLlgxyZc/T3o8R487ekI/AAAAAAAACgc/n5SBfNvE7JQ/s1600/S7307689.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ByGoLlgxyZc/T3o8R487ekI/AAAAAAAACgc/n5SBfNvE7JQ/s320/S7307689.jpg" width="244" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eKSMDKVZOhE/T3o8SyGD7qI/AAAAAAAACgk/ojiPgWlWgj8/s1600/S7307691.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eKSMDKVZOhE/T3o8SyGD7qI/AAAAAAAACgk/ojiPgWlWgj8/s320/S7307691.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W9PAOhvmVdM/T3o8Ui3lQXI/AAAAAAAACgs/51-BylogA18/s1600/S7307693.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-W9PAOhvmVdM/T3o8Ui3lQXI/AAAAAAAACgs/51-BylogA18/s320/S7307693.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br />The Synapse instruments are pretty cool, and what I like about this bass is the wide, flat freboard, and the tone that one can get out of the piezo pickup. However, they are built in Korea, and for a Korean-made instrument, overpriced. It has the fit-and-finish of a slightly unfinished prototype, with a number of little details that don't quite seem right, such as the battery compartment. I've also heard horror stories that the truss rod is very flimsy -- a couple of owners have described online how they were unfortunately able to break them, without what seemed like an excess of force. So I am being very careful when I adjust the truss rod on mine. It isn't a great instrument and I can't actually recommend them for either live or studio work. I am thoroughly disgusted by the damage Gibson has done to the Steinberger name; this isn't my first Gibson-era Steinberger bass with <a href="http://geekversusguitar.blogspot.com/2009/05/guitar-pron-3-steinberger-xq-4-bass.html">issues</a>. In an era where manufacturing has made such incredible advances it is just heartbreaking that one can't just buy a Steinberger bass that lives up to the original and justifiably loved Brooklyn and Newburgh instruments.<br /><br />I had ordered a second fretted one, in white, through Sweetwater, thinking that a black fretless and a white fretted bass would pretty much cover all the, er, basses, and look really cool if I ever played out and switched between them for different songs. However, Sweetwater reported that the instrument Gibson sent them to fill my order did not pass their quality control and so they had sent it back. It didn't seem like Gibson was going to get around to making a good one, so I cancelled the order rather than wait indefinitely.<br /><br />Because this model isn't popular, and because it is quirky, no one seems to make strings that will fit it. I think this bass still has the original factory strings. La Bella does not make a set designed for this bass. The ball-end strings it uses are similar, but not exactly the same, as strings for the old Newburgh or even Music Yo Steinbergers.<br /><br />The instrument supposedly gives you some flexibility about strings since you can use either double-ball-end strings or single-ball-end strings; in the case of single-ball-end strings the idea is that you can clamp the top of the string in a little clamp. But in practice the strings have to be exactly the right gauge to fit, and none I've tried are.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hDXAu93ga1k/T3o8Qf7qstI/AAAAAAAACgU/jmNOl2nxrgg/s1600/S7307687.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hDXAu93ga1k/T3o8Qf7qstI/AAAAAAAACgU/jmNOl2nxrgg/s320/S7307687.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-77wZd30na84/T3o8PMjOucI/AAAAAAAACgM/kXwNWrxdxN8/s1600/S7307686.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-77wZd30na84/T3o8PMjOucI/AAAAAAAACgM/kXwNWrxdxN8/s320/S7307686.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />A few years ago I ordered some La Bella black tape-wound nylon strings from Just Strings Dot Com. They did not fit: the low B string was too fat to fit in the channel at the top of the neck, and the winding did not extend far enough down the string to allow it to sit properly on the bridge. Just Strings Dot Com has a strict no-return policy if a pack of strings has been opened, even if it hasn't been actually put on an instrument or played. As a result, I will no longer buy strings from them.<br /><br />La Bella offered to take them back, and I had a tentative plan to ship them my bass and the strings and have them make a custom set, but I never followed through with that plan, and wound up getting some older Newburgh Steinberger basses instead.<br /><br />The Synapse sat mostly unloved, and the black tape-wound strings went on my son's Peavey 5-string bass.<br /><br />Anyway, these things come around again. I've recently been playing the Synapse again. I've used it on a couple of original songs, including "I. O. U." and "Falling: A Nightmare in Three Acts" and with my Radial JDV direct box and some tweaked compressor plug-ins, I really do love the sound of this bass, and so I've been practicing and working with a book, trying to improve my fretless skills, and the string issue is back on my mind because the original strings just can't sound as good as they should anymore.<br /><br />I ordered two string sets from Status Graphite in England. They say that they hand-make their strings and that they have the widest variety of double-ball-end strings. They say "They will work perfectly on all Steinberger and many other headless basses." I ordered both a black nylon tape-wound set and a flat-wound set thinking that I'd like to try both. (One of the advantages of the Steinberger system is that it is very easy to change strings, assuming no change of setup is needed, so you can take off one kind of string and put on another for a specific recording session and the ones you took off will not be damaged by this treatment like they would be if you had to wind and unwind them on peg heads).<br /><br />The Status Graphite strings showed up today. Here's Joshua holding one of the sets:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NaTKRXuXAls/T3ezksxWm_I/AAAAAAAACfI/3xYM5C-fptw/s1600/S7307675.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-NaTKRXuXAls/T3ezksxWm_I/AAAAAAAACfI/3xYM5C-fptw/s320/S7307675.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Here's a close-up to show which set it is:</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qe5KFmzaXZs/T3ezky_4kSI/AAAAAAAACfY/59Qw8Ragchg/s1600/S7307676.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qe5KFmzaXZs/T3ezky_4kSI/AAAAAAAACfY/59Qw8Ragchg/s320/S7307676.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Aaaaand, unfortunately, after all this, they also don't fit the Synapse so I will be getting in touch with them to see if I can return them. I would use them on one of my other Steinbergers, but they are all four-string basses. I will inquire whether Status Graphite thinks they can make me some that will fit. Maybe I can send them the original strings to use for reference.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">In the picture below (sorry it's blurry) the bottom string is the original, at the bridge end, and the top is the SG string. Note the wrapped fat portion. The SG string doesn't sit properly on the bridge.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pPW9JItu5Z8/T3ezlhLQtlI/AAAAAAAACfg/EeQRbTfhDf8/s1600/S7307677.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pPW9JItu5Z8/T3ezlhLQtlI/AAAAAAAACfg/EeQRbTfhDf8/s320/S7307677.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Here is the odd headstock of the Synapse. The SG string is the right length but it is too fat to fit into the channel. Also, the wrap again may start in the wrong place, although it's not as dramatic as the difference on the bridge end.</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-J7A-muK3sW0/T3ezl-KW3_I/AAAAAAAACfs/qKj3F4G2XZo/s1600/S7307678.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-J7A-muK3sW0/T3ezl-KW3_I/AAAAAAAACfs/qKj3F4G2XZo/s320/S7307678.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />I'll see what Status Graphite says. I know from some message board discussions that there are other folks out there with this same problem, although from what I can tell there may be fewer than a dozen of these fretless 5-string Synapse basses in existence. Perhaps they were all made for a NAMM show and then sold without ever having full-scale production runs.<br /><br />Meanwhile, if you have had any success finding strings for a Synapse 5-string bass, please leave a comment. Note that round-wound strings are no good for fretless playing as they will chew up the fingerboard quickly; I need flat-wound or black nylon tape wound. (I'm thinking the black strings on the black bass would just look cool as hell, too).<br /><br />UPDATE: June 8 2013: I have sold this bass. If I can afford one at some point, I hope to buy a NS Radius fretless bass to replace it at some point if finances allow.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-21808283289116424892012-02-25T08:15:00.002-08:002012-03-21T11:53:58.997-07:00I.O.U.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WUWJCNTBEbQ/T0kM2Z8KhQI/AAAAAAAACbA/MaZ4GPRI8_w/s1600/iou_uke_and_junk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WUWJCNTBEbQ/T0kM2Z8KhQI/AAAAAAAACbA/MaZ4GPRI8_w/s400/iou_uke_and_junk.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/i-o-u">This song</a> is my SpinTunes 4 round 3 entry. For this round, I took 3 days off work to record, like I did for my round 1 song. There's a video <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kEYxrLkLYQ">here</a>.<br /><br />The challenge was interesting: "Choose seven letters of the Roman alphabet. Now write a song using ONLY words that begin with those seven letters. No exceptions will be made for minor parts of speech or vamping at the beginning of the song or the end."<br /><br />So... I was an English major and an essay and short story writer and poet, and I've been paid to do technical writing at times. In these contests, the writing of the lyrics themselves has usually come relatively easily, and I can generally start out by writing a lot of verses or rhymes and then trim them down. But this challenge turns that strength into a weakness, like a golf handicap -- it makes it extremely painful to write _any_ lines that don't sound forced or stilted, and writing normal rhymed lines is almost impossible. Almost as if -- that were the point of the challenge, perhaps? ; )<br /><br />Initially I thought on the challenge for a day or two, but I didn't really come up with anything. My mind was pretty much a blank until I happened to sit down on the toilet (yes, really) and the first phrase popped into my head: "I owe you my life, my love." From my scribbled notes it looks like my first five letters were going to be I, O, Y, M, L, but at first I was going to use A and F. I wrote some lyrics using the F to write lines like "find another year of laughter," but there were a lot of really, really contorted phrasings, that barely made any sense, so I set the lyrics aside and on my first day off work, started on the music.<br /><br />The music is quite different this time. You might notice I don't have any real chords in the usual sense. Oh, there are some implied chords, but here I am, a guitarist, and I'm never actually _strumming_ a chord. The approach I took for the music was inspired by a band called The Books. This song really doesn't sound much like the Books, but there was something about the way they recorded traditional instruments, especially the way they were equalized and featured as solo instruments, that appealed to me and was in the back of my head. The use of the ringing reverb on the percussion was also directly inspired by a Books song. (In fact, I wouldn't be shocked to find out that they used Logic's Space Designer plug-in).<br /><br />In recording this I started with the electric guitar. The whole song started out as a phrase of a few notes ending with a harmonic. I doubled this and messed around in this vein for a while soon had four guitar tracks of repeating, overlapping phrases. Then I did a similar thing with fretless bass, and then ukulele. I had no basic structure in mind except for these repeating patterns, with the idea that I would then do a lot of mixer automation or editing to bring the overlapping parts up and down in interesting patterns. I have no idea why I thought this was work; I'd like to claim that I had a finished track in my head but in fact it was stone soup.<br /><br />So right off the bat there was a very large number of tracks. Then when I felt that I had enough stringed instruments, I recorded a lot of little percussion bits: some real instruments, like shaker, a small guiro, triangle, and finger cymbals, but also an empty plastic cottage cheese container, some stainless steel measuring spoons, a meat skewer, a light bulb that I hit (gently) with a triangle beater, two metal rasps, and some tearing and crumpling paper. Grace was somewhat bemused when she saw me rummage through the kitchen drawers for things that would clink and clank.<br /><br />At the end of the first day's recording, I had those instruments and percussion sounds all playing in one big mix, and listened to it downstairs on my PA speakers. It sounded kind of cool, and promising, but it was overwhelmingly busy, and nothing was evenly leveled. But still, it sounded like progress.<br /><br />On day 2, I hacked and slashed and mixed and edited the tracks from the previous day, then started working on recording vocals, and got a chorus and a few lines of verse down. I had then run out of lyrics, so that afternoon I spent a few painful hours with a dictionary and rhyming dictionary. I finally settled on using W, so I could write "When we met long years ago you welcomed me with love and laughter." I managed to grit my teeth and write about ten new lines, plus a short coda, using the seven letters I, O, Y, M, L, A, and W. (If this doesn't sound hard to you, try it; maybe I just picked bad letters).<br /><br />Ideally, given enough talent and skill and work, one could write a song that uses a constraint like this, and the result would not seem like a strange novelty, but just a good song. If it was done well enough, the listener wouldn't even realize there is something strange about the lyrics unless he or she really sat down and looked at them written out. That was my goal; whether I met it is for you to decide. But it's also the real reason the lyrics are sung the way they are -- repeating and overlapping -- because there just weren't enough lyrics to sustain a whole song unless I did something to recycle them and stretch them out. After I did it that way, though, I was very pleased with the results, and realized that a lot of my favorite songs don't have very many lyrics at all, or at least not very many unique lines - for example, Pink Floyd's song "Goodbye Blue Sky."<br /><br />You might also notice that this song doesn't go verse, chorus, verse, chorus; it goes chorus, verse, chorus, coda. That's a bit different. I think it's because the first lines I came up with seemed to be a chorus, and I recorded those scratch vocals first, and just went from there. But then of course it needed verses, and it was so _hard_ to write verses.<br /><br />Anyway, by late afternoon on day two I had the two-line chorus, the coda, and ten lines of what seemed like verse material. It seemed reasonable to cut those ten verse lines down to eight lines, which would have naturally broken into two verses of four lines. That would let me do chorus, verse, chorus, verse, coda; a pretty conventional structure. I recorded those so I had a reference scratch vocal and made a mix to send to Joe "Covenant" Lamb so he could sing it and send me a lyric (he's five hours ahead in Scotland, so it was quite late in the evening there; this sort of collaboration would be easier if he were five hours behind; I could hand him off something to work on when I knocked off for the day, and he'd have it done in my morning). But Joe is kind of a night owl so he did in fact have something for me before I went to bed. But unfortunately what he had for me was bad news: he was having problems with his recording setup, and his recorded vocals were full of crackling noises.<br /><br />So, day 3. I started out working on stems. Oh yeah, stems. A "stem" is a partial mix in which you combine tracks into a single track to make them easier to work with. I also was up to almost 30 tracks just for the instruments and percussion, which was becoming unmanageable, so I bounced the bass parts together to a single track, the guitar parts, the ukulele parts, etc.<br /><br />Of course I don't really know what I'm doing, and so I sound up deleting the original source tracks with their mixer automation, which means the stems are now not really changeable. I made a "basic" percussion stem, I put the reverb effects on that group of percussion into a separate stem, in case I wanted to adjust its volume, which turned out to be a wise move.<br /><br />Grace came into the studio at this point to listen and offer suggestions. Of course one of my her very good and sensible suggestions would have involved changing the guitar stem. She pointed out that the song is too slow to get going and wanted me to remove one of the building "repeats" of the introductory guitar part. But that stem had become unchangeable due to my poor planning. It was at this point that I had a mild nervous breakdown...<br /><br />Anyway, sometimes you just have to sort of cover up mistakes a bit, or feature them, instead of correcting them. I did what in screenwriting they call "hanging a lampshade on it." If there is an obvious plot hole, rather than ignoring it, sometimes the screenwriter will have a character specifically comment on how odd it is. This sort of makes the audience nod along and say "yes, that is odd" -- but because one of the characters thinks it is odd, it becomes more acceptable. My version of "hanging a lampshade" was to add some extra off-beat percussion hits on a slightly unwanted extra repeat of the introductory guitar phrase - basically making an awkward phrase more awkward. It also serves to introduce one of the percussion sounds that is otherwise kind of low in the mix when it is used elsewhere.<br /><br />Joe was still having troubles, and it didn't seem like switching sample rate was going to help, so I realized I had to record my own vocals. This in a contest where I'd been specifically criticized by multiple judges for my weak singing! Did I mention I have a mild head cold?<br /><br />So on to recording. But I knew, and Joe had also pointed out, some of my my ten lines sounded kind of clichéd or otherwise dumb. I had:<br /><br /><blockquote>When we met long years ago, you<br />Welcomed me with love and laughter<br /><br />I'll melt with willing obligation<br />*I'll make mad love with only you<br /><br />My incandescent love I owe you<br />Another year's improvisation<br /><br />I offer you my lullabye<br />You are my moment's inspiration<br /><br />* Once more my love I'm all about<br />* Making myself all about you</blockquote><br />I cut out the ones I've marked with a star, so I was down to seven. Then I had to throw out one pretty-good sounding line ("you are my moment's inspiration") simply because I couldn't find another decent line to go with it (and I didn't want to get into odd numbers of lines). With a little rearranging that left me six verse lines I felt pretty good about:<br /><br /><blockquote>When we met long years ago, you<br />Welcomed me with love and laughter<br /><br />My incandescent love I owe you<br />Another year's improvisation<br /><br />I'll melt with willing obligation<br />I offer you my lullabye</blockquote><br />There's that word "incandescent" -- a strange word choice, it sticks out a bit, but I like it. With very little time left, I had to stop there - but honestly, I'm not sure I could come up with better lines given the challenge, at least not without throwing out my letters and starting from scratch. It's a poetry cliché that you have to be willing and able to kill your children if they are deformed or just unnecessary, but it was especially hard to throw out these lines - so what if some of my children are a little goofy?<br /><br />There's another aspect to the song structure, though -- the overall arc. I couldn't get those ten lines to tell a sort of story. With six acceptable lines the three pairs of lines do form an arc from the past to the future and back to the present.<br /><br />With just six lines, it seemed more natural to put them together and repeat them against each other to make a sort-of-round. Again, the challenge was forcing me to create a more unusual structure, but when I listened back to my improvised melody in the scratch vocal track, I was very happy to hear that it seemed like the melodies would mesh pretty well against each other (this is where having essentially no chords in the accompaniment &nbsp;-- where the melody doesn't drive the accompaniment to "take a stand" on a given subset of notes of the scale -- allows some flexibility.<br /><br />Anyway, to my ear it kind of works like so: the first chorus builds up to 3 parts, then the sort-of-round of all the verses (or one big verse, however you want to think of it), then the second chorus sort of scales it back down, then you get a little dessert of the coda, fadeout, done, badda bing, badda boom.<br /><br />I learned today (the end of day 3) that when it is cold and my singing muscles are tired I have an unwanted and automatic vibrato on some lower notes and not others. Sometimes no amount of retakes can make a take perfect, but you can kind of hide it by doubling it and harmonizing against it. Pitch correction can help a little bit but it can easily sound unnatural, and you've got to get within striking distance of the right notes and stay there. So again, the general deadline-based frustration, knowing that I probably could sing slightly better, but knowing that I wasn't going to have time to do so.<br /><br />Grace's other suggestion was that when the vocals kick in, the accompaniment needs to go "up" another notch -- to get another instrument or shift one gear up. I considered adding some autoharp, but mine doesn't have a D major chord (and it also takes forever to tune). She was thinking the song needed to embrace a calypso feel. I thought it was a little like that already, but by "calypso feel" I meant something like the Laurie Anderson song "Blue Lagoon," or the Suzanne Vega song "Calypso." She meant something like a Calypso steel drum solo, and asked me if I had any good horn sounds. It was at this point that I had my second nervous breakdown of the day. After hyperventilating for a while I settled on bringing back in a shaker and some other bits of percussion. And then I spent a couple of hours tweaking mix levels, and mastering settings, and compressor ratios, and gains, and then decided it was mostly done.<br /><br />Oh, also, this seems to be a love song to my wife of ten years, Grace. I am not a very romantic guy and I did not set out to write a love song. My idea of a love song is Gang of Four's "Anthrax." So imagine my surprise when THIS came out!<br /><br />The lyrics before last-minute revisions read:<br /><br /><blockquote>I owe you my life, my love<br />All I am and all I own is yours<br /><br />When we met long years ago, you<br />Welcomed me with love and laughter<br /><br />I'll melt with willing obligation<br />I'll make mad love with only you<br /><br />My incandescent love I owe you<br />Another year's improvisation<br /><br />I offer you my lullabye<br />You are my moment's inspiration<br /><br />Once more my love I'm all about<br />Making myself all about you<br /><br />Adieu, my lady love<br />I owe you my life</blockquote><br />The lyrics in the finished song are:<br /><br /><blockquote>I owe you my life, my love<br />All I am and all I own is yours<br /><br />When we met long years ago, you<br />Welcomed me with love and laughter<br /><br />My incandescent love I owe you<br />Another year's improvisation<br /><br />I'll melt with willing obligation<br />I offer you my lullabye<br /><br />I owe you my life, my love<br />All I am and all I own is yours<br /><br />Adieu, my lady love<br />I owe you my life</blockquote><br />Update: after submitting my song and meeting the deadline, I discovered that I do in fact have all the stem sources with mixer automation, since I was smart enough to save a separate project file for that. I also discovered that my bass stem was a little bit screwed up -- it had some excess distortion, as well as one of the ukulele parts mixed in with it, and had been bounced with the mastering plug-in turned on, meaning that in addition to the EQ on the track itself, it had aggressive mastering EQ and compression applied _twice_ in the final mix. That's no good, so I fixed that, and uploaded a revised version. The revised version also has some tweaks to the mastering so it is a little bit less aggressively bright and more natural sounding. Honestly, you might not notice these differences unless you do a direct A/B comparison and you're listening on something better than laptop speakers, but it was important to me that the track not have noticeable distortion in it. There is some noticeable "beating" of bass frequencies as the bass lines overlap, due to variance in the intonation of notes on the fretless bass, but I'm not going to fix that; consider it character. I'll just try to remember not to blend low notes on the fretless bass. The effect isn't nearly as noticeable in the higher registers, at least to my ear.<br /><br />Many thanks to everyone who gave me praise and encouragement when they heard this track!<br /><br />Update 2: well, it turns out I flubbed the challenge. In the process of recording my final vocals, I accidentally sang "I offer you this lullabye" instead of "I offer you my lullabye," and then repeated it on the doubling and harmony lines. And so I used an extra letter. Oddly, I had a dream early Saturday morning the day before the challenge was due -- a dream in which I was listening to my draft song and realized I had blown the challenge. I woke up in a panic at about 4 a.m., but could not remember exactly what the issue was. I read over my lyrics carefully, couldn't see anything wrong, and went back to bed. I should have listened to what I actually recorded; my brain did. In any case, I wasn't too broken up, because I received a lot of very positive feedback about the song, and I had tried to keep myself somewhat unconcerned about winning the contest. I feel that the judges' decision was fair; I did screw up. In the midst of working full time and raising 5 kids I don't need more stress. But still, I am curious whether I could have won the whole thing.<br /><br />Credits: Paul R. Potts: Steinberger Synapse 5-string fretless bass, Peavey Firenza P-90 electric guitar (with Ernie Ball Slinky 11s), Ovation Applause tenor ukulele, plastic cottage cheese container, steel meat skewer, steel measuring spoons, paper, finger cymbals, light bulb, steel beater, triangle, rasps, sleighbells. Oktava MK-319 condenser microphone, Radial JDV direct box, Apogee Ensemble audio interface, Apple Logic, Izotope Ozone.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-84448489499767173412012-02-14T16:16:00.001-08:002012-02-14T16:16:23.671-08:00A Brother's ValentineI wasn't sure I'd manage to finish anything for round 2, because I lost one day to illness and didn't schedule any time off work. But putting in a little time Friday night and Saturday afternoon, <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/a-brothers-valentine-explicit-lyrics">here's</a> what I came up with (the link is to the song page on Bandcamp where you can download a high-resolution version). I also made a quickie <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVggFHKphZU">video</a> in what seems to be turning into a series of videos involving drawing or writing (you might call it the "no budget series," although art supplies don't grow on trees!) I didn't have a great idea for the drawings; they are doodles I had put in a new notebook over the course of the past week, with the idea that I might try animating them or otherwise turning them into a story for the video. The story part didn't really come together but I thought they belonged in the video somehow. I'm experimenting with some other drawings that I hope will eventually become low-frame-rate stop motion animation. iMovie is not really set up to do anything very elaborate with a series of stills. You can string them together but they have to be individually cropped (I think) and that's pretty tedious.<br /><br />I don't have any chords to post. There is a melody, but it's pretty simple, and not very tightly played. There's a second synth part, but it is just some pedal tones. The song is in Bb. There's a repeating bass riff which is basically a little blues thing with some chromatic notes. It's all in one simple position. <br /><i>Song Notes</i><br /><br />The challenge for SpinTunes 4, Round 2 was to "write a musical Valentine's Day card to someone OTHER than your significant other."<br /><br />I started thinking about ideas that have been kicking around in my head for a while -- about how hard it is for adult men, maybe with wives and families -- to maintain supportive friendships and creative partnerships with other men. There's the context of competition, of course - in sports, even playing on the same team, but what sort of role models are there for support and creative collaboration? Even talking about it seems suspicious, and immediately brings up the idea that such a desire is something only a closeted gay man would express.<br /><br />If there seems to be homophobic anger in the song I hope the listener will understand that it is not intended towards gay men, but towards the society that has made connecting with men platonically taboo. I hope that comes through.<br /><br />On paper this song was a mess, and I wasn't making much progress. It filled several pages in my notebook with ranty paragraphs of text that weren't really rappable verses. I could sort of read it and it was funny and made some sense, but it was much too long and didn't have a workably rhyme scheme. Only after going into the studio and recording the first verse did it start to come into shape. I recorded the chorus very roughly following a melody I laid down with my guitar synth, and screwed around with the pitch using some plug-ins, and that's where it pretty much stayed. At the end of a couple of hours the Friday night before it was due I had the first verse and a chorus and that was what I had to build on. It was weird, but I kind of liked it.<br /><br />I was much more pressed for time on this track than I was on the last one; this one represents a total of about eight hours of work in the studio. There is much that is sloppy and that I might have liked to do better, but I'm also trying to just complete more tracks, imperfections and all. While I was recording rap sections today my three middle kids were down the hall in the bathtub having some sort of screaming contest, as kids do. I kept hearing the screaming in my headphones and finally just took my digital recorder in there and captured them screaming, and worked that into the lyrics and the audio. Lemons and lemonade... it was freezing cold in the studio today -- layers, chattering teeth, and stiff hands. The heat was on constantly so no chance to get audio takes without the heating system in the background; no time left for extra takes anyway. Oh, well!<br /><br />I intended to record this one at 24/96 like the last one, but somehow my Logic project got set back to 24/44.1. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. I had to master myself this time using Ozone 5. It's not like having a real mastering engineer but it can still do some pretty cool things.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-59908049708039954682012-02-04T22:32:00.000-08:002012-02-04T23:34:57.943-08:00In Which I Say a Few Nice Things (and a Few Confused Things)I wrote these comments below a couple of days ago, while judging for SpinTunes Round 1 was in progress. I held off posting this until the rankings for round 1 were posted. They just were, so here it is. New commentary is at the end.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Comments on SpinTunes 4 Round 1 Tracks</span></b></i><br /><br />So I said I wouldn't do this -- review tracks for a songwriting competition that I'm in the midst of. But I'm a bad person; I can't help myself. I will try something different, though; I'll hold off on posting it until after the judging for round 1 is done. Also, I'll try positive reinforcement only. In other words, I'll only point out the stuff that I think is good. If I don't mention much about a given song it doesn't necessarily mean I hated it; it may just not have stood out to me. Try not to hate me. Everyone's tastes are different. here we go. This is probably ill-advised. I'm kind of like that in general.<br /><br /><b>Governing Dynamics - Fear Nothing</b><br /><br />As is often the case with GD songs, I really like the guitar work. The basses are nice, the phasing is subtle and spacey, and it's nightmarish without being completely over the top. The emotive vocals are really nice. GD deserves to win a whole SpinTunes one of these times.<br /><br /><b>FauX - Sleep</b><br /><br />I like the reverb-y piano and the keyboard and drums that sound unusually happy for a nightmare. The music has some interesting riffage going on. The last section has a sort of retro space sound that appeals to me.<br /><br /><b>Dex01 - Let Me Out</b><br /><br />Nice reverb-tank guitar sound and I'm pretty pleased with the breathy vocal and the use of backing vocals.<br /><br /><b>Hazen Nester - An Indelible Mark</b><br /><br />The guitar and toy piano sounds are nicely done, especially the little fingered guitar notes that track the melody at times. The singing is appropriately dry and intimate-sounding, and the lyrics are truly gruesome -- I get the sense that this is a true story. This is a strong candidate for best of the round.<br /><br /><b>Rebecca Angel - Monster's Lullaby</b><br /><br />The whispery vocal is really lovely here. I'm reminded of Hugo Largo. Lyrics like "turtles clicking nails like knives" are suitably bizarre and nightmarish.<br /><br /><b>David LeDuc - Nightmare</b><br /><br />Nice guitar work and vocal.<br /><br /><b>Felix Frost - Rust People</b><br /><br />I like the variety of crazy sounds going on here.<br /><br /><b>Jacob Haller - The Maze</b><br /><br />Lines like "an invisible man with a visible brain" make me smile.<br /><br /><b>Brian Gray - Just a Dream</b><br /><br />I think this is a really strong song from Brian. I especially like the lyrics and vocal performance, and it got a melody that is a little more active and full of changes than the usual. It's funny. I also like his use of what he says is a box of silverware for some of his percussion!<br /><br /><b>Gold Lion - Lady in Blue</b><br /><br />A really strong vocal and guitar performance here. It reminds me somewhat of Sarah Blasko.<br /><br /><b>Jess Scherer - Taken</b><br /><br />Nice vocal and piano performances.<br /><br /><b>Jim Holmquist - Old Dan Next Door</b><br /><br />I like the doubled vocals; I really like the idea that the nightmare is someone else's (not the narrator's) and it might have something to do with Dan being a war veteran. However, this also makes me fear that the song my get a technical disqualification since I'm not sure it's a <i>childhood</i> nightmare. It's a little confusing in that regard since it says "Dan next door had that dream since he was four." That will be for the judges to decide.<br /><br /><b>Drei Viertel Drei - Lollipop Lady</b><br /><br />I like the idea that it's a real person who triggered the nightmare ("she lived in his nightmares.") "Lollipop Lady" is, I think, not an American idiom but I think it eventually becomes clear -- that she is a crossing guard. I like the idea that someone whose job it is to terrorize children about real-world hazards might wind up triggering other nightmares. The lyrics seem to use "kidneys" as meaning "fears" which again I'm not sure is all that clear.<br /><br /><b>Emperor Gum - Posted</b><br /><br />Single tear at the touching lyrics. If a certain judge who talks about evaluating the song as a platonic ideal is serious, I expect him to rate this one quite highly.<br /><br /><b>Kevin Savino-Riker - Thunder</b><br /><br />Strong lyrics; nice use of subtle internal rhymes. I like the slightly dissonant chord progression and the way he slaps that guitar around.<br /><br /><b>Menage A Tune - Haunting House</b><br /><br />A strong effort from JoAnn in the production sense. I also like the fact that the nightmare story is based on her real nightmares.<br /><br /><b>Chris Cogott</b><br /><br />A strong contender for best of round. The "I try to scream but there's no sound / I try to run but my legs are frozen to the ground" is classic nightmare fodder. I like the sort of Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds vibe.<br /><br /><b>Steve Durand - It Isn't Cool</b><br /><br />The naked-at-school is a nightmare I don't ever think I had, but it's funny, and I like the cheesy church-organ, banjo, and horn sounds.<br /><br /><b>Jon Eric - Images Without Light</b><br /><br />The title is a little strange but a neat metaphor for what we see with our eyes closed. This is a pretty neat and tidy package.<br /><br /><b>Ross Durand - Why Can't I?</b><br /><br />Nice bluesy material -- strong guitar and resonant vocals. Classic nightmare scenario lyrics with a twist -- usually a flying dream is a positive experience and it's the person having the dream who is flying.<br /><br /><i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Comments After the Results of Round 1</span></b></i><br /><br />So, I didn't expect to do really well this round, but after listening to all 34 entries several times, I did expect to survive the round. I did, but by the skin of my teeth -- my track was the last one not to be cut (assuming the results are correct and won't be amended). That was a little unexpected.<br /><br />I didn't expect JoAnn to get cut. I didn't expect her song to <i>sweep</i> the round, but... cut? Really?<br /><br />I thought Brian Gray's entry would get more love than it did; it was a really strong song, in my opinion.<br /><br />The Felix Frost song I expected to do worse; in my opinion, it is technically sweet but just has too much going on to be a really compelling song; it's hard to hear all that stuff at once.<br /><br />I like Chris Cogott's song but I didn't think it was <i>dramatically</i> the best, if that makes any sense.<br /><br />So as usual I can't make a lot of sense of some of the judges' rankings.<br /><br />Let me make some notes about how I feel about my old song a week later. I've tried to listen to it a few more times, and hear it through other people's ears. What I think is that I really like some things about it, and feel kind if indifferent about some things. I don't have a lot of actual <i>negative</i> feelings, although there are a couple.<br /><br />Overall it feels a little too bombastic, prog-rock, high concept, whatever. It also has that dirge-y thing I'm having trouble expunging from my songs in general. It sounds to me like some kind of experimental piece that might go with an art exhibition, maybe a project in a student show done in the basement in a student union by a student jazz ensemble of three guys who recently smoked too much dope and went without enough sleep.<br /><br />I really like the fretless bass, and the use of fretless bass up the neck doubling some of the melody. No one commented on that. There are a few glitches in my playing but for the most part I like the way that line sounds. That leaves me confused; am I just wrong to like it? Was it actually bad? Or indifferent? How many of the songs used fretless bass? And yet no one noticed it?<br /><br />I like the guitar sounds, and the way they fit together. I like the melodies that are there, such as they are, especially the way it elevates in act 3. I like my long chord solo and the way the guitars haltingly follow each other in a sort of stumbling way.<br /><br />I'm proud of what I achieved with the fake piano and the guitar playing; it's a more complicated accompaniment part.<br /><br />I don't like the spoken word parts -- that Shakespeare and Plutarch. If I redid it, I would either get rid of them entirely or maybe bring in multiple parts overlapping in an intro.<br /><br />I have mixed feelings about my vocals. In part 2 the pitch isn't <i>supposed</i> to be perfect. It's supposed to be spoken-ish and more poignant; the voice is supposed to sound distressed. In part 3 it's about a beautiful memory from the past for a while and it's supposed to sound energized, but it doesn't sound energized _enough_. I should have used some harmonies here, and maybe introduced some percussion. It's supposed to sound soaring which is in <i>ironic</i>&nbsp;<i>contrast</i> with the sadness of the lyrics which fuck it, if I have to explain this, it obviously didn't work.<br /><br />Speaking of not working, I feel like people rarely "get" my lyrics. The internal rhymes, the twisting line... I put a lot of work into that, and my word choices, especially in editing it down and using a limited child-like vocabulary. I do a lot of editing, especially given the <i>time</i> constraints. The lyric went through something like five or six major revisions. I felt proud of it. Pearls before swine, it feels like, sometimes. I guess that's childish. It disappoints me that the lyrics really got no comments. I feel in general like the judges barely read the lyrics as they had almost nothing critical to say about the weaker lyrics in some songs.<br /><br />This was a hard song to do, technically. I took three days off work to build it. I really have little formal musical training except I can read just a tiny bit and I've had some coaching on chords and scales; probably fewer than a dozen formal lessons in my life, and for everything else I'm either self-taught or ignorant or both. I don't know rubato from Ru Paul. I looked up the definition and it seemed to me that I had to be able to arbitrarily speed up the tempo to fit the mood of the song, so I didn't record with a click track. That meant that synchronizing all the parts, for example the vocal doubling was very tricky. I recorded over a hundred vocal takes in the process of trying to get good ones, over the course of three long days. There was probably a way I could have used a click track for the whole thing and had the click track vary smoothly, rather than just speed up or slow down on a dime, but I didn't know how to do that, at least not in time. I recorded the MIDI piano and oud with a guitar synth, then hand-edited the MIDI notes to clean them up, and sang against that as a reference, and when I made a change I had to throw out whole sections and record all the parts again.<br /><br />Well, so what about all that? It isn't like that actually counts for anything if the finished product isn't any good. I was ranked very low -- far lower than people who probably spent 10% or less of the time I did - who probably just sketched out the lyrics and a few chord symbols and just improvised the melody for the recording. Which brings me back to what the hell this is all for, if none of this work shows. Which brings me back to what seems to be fundamentally a broken <i>process</i> on my part, that starts from the head and not the heart. But there must be some other musician out there who has worked through this same problem.<br /><br />I say it just to vent, mostly. There's no point in whining about being misunderstood, if no one understands, if that makes sense. If the song isn't... at least intriguing, then I failed completely. And this is where my resolve wavers. Is it time to just sell this studio shit, my audio interface and mics and Reflexion filter and mic stands, my guitars and tuners and a drawer full of strings, software plug-ins, DX-7 and MIDI interface and direct boxes? And do... what exactly? Only play guitar? Or give that up too? Well, shit. This comes down to the question of why I do this stuff. Hint: I probably wouldn't stop even if no one else in the world liked it even a little bit. I guess that's the part that I feel like no one will understand who doesn't do this kind of thing.<br /><br />But here's the thing about the vocals -- they don't sound quite like I wanted in terms of volume and compression, but as far as my vocal performance, they <i>do</i> sound mostly like I wanted them to, for the song. They sound a little haunted, to me, without being a totally over-the-top performance of mock terror which would have made the whole thing more parody than I was going for. The doubling isn't perfect but it's some of the best doubling I've done, and it would have been a hell of a lot easier with a click. The pitch on part 3 is, I think, some of the best singing I've done as far as pitch goes. In fact my singing has been improving, according to my own recordings of myself, and according to my wife, who has to hear me do my practicing and covers and what-not when I play guitar. So I was quite proud of it. Improvement. So I find the comments that single out my singing especially painful. Especially when I listen to some of the other shitty singing that apparently got a pass. At least shitty to my ear, in the sense that it was entirely conventional, tedious, and uninteresting.<br /><br />Something something something about people who never seem to appreciate any form of novelty, even the appearance of it because they have such limited experience, in food, in films, in books, in performances. Something negative. In my book, at least partial credit will always be given for at least the attempt at originality. Even when the result doesn't entirely work.<br /><br />Anyway, every part of this song had an increased "degree of difficulty" for me -- the challenge, the length, the changing moods I was attempting to get across, the technical difficulty of working without a click track, and even a bunch of practical things like shifting keys and down-tuning as well as my monitor speakers shorting out, electrical noise in my ribbon mic, the noisy kids outside my studio room and occasionally getting picked up by the mic, and our house water heater dying so I didn't get to shower for two days while recording. Did I mention the lights flickering and the power threatening to go out which made me want to freeze a track really early in the process so the judges had _a_ version in case I couldn't get any more work on it done, or even upload it? That sounds stupid but it's all stress and it all took up time and space in my brain and affected what I could get done. So... a successful failure? Did I learn anything, at least? Is this just one of the songs I have to get out of the way in order to write a better one later? Did I actually learn any skills from all of this? From the challenge part?<br /><br />When do I figure that out?<br /><br />Anyway, the review notes. I'll just mash these all together; you can read the originals and take apart who they are if you want.<br /><br /><i>Wow, quite the epic journey! Another nightmare about divorce and the father leaving and it also feels like a lot of important processing happened through writing this. The sound effects and music are all very effective for creating the moody, heartbroken, unsettling atmosphere. A few potential lyric tweaks in Act 3: the line “Now you are gone, gone, gone” in 3b feels like it comes too soon in the story line. I think it would be smoother to flow, “When I was small, we did all these things that were fun, and then you were gone.” rather than “When I was small, we did all these things, now you’re gone, then we did some more things and now you are gone.” Also the part “Gone from your children, gone from your wife, gone from my brother, gone from our lives” kind of trips me up because I start thinking - isn’t your brother and his children the same thing?</i><br /><br />The lyrics... well, I was trying to do something with the fact that there's not actually a surprise. We've already had the reveal that the nightmare was real. The surprise is in the narrator's reaction; that the song has become happy, in a sense, about loss. It's supposed to be a sort of apotheosis.<br /><br />It's nice to hear things like "the sound effects and music are all very effective." Really, thank you.<br /><br /><i>1. You're a little low in the mix. I get this weird feeling I’m in some kind of spoken word/poetry reading sort of environment and perhaps it is not really too song-y. This is fine with me, I almost think that’s more your milieu.</i><br /><br />It's a fair cop. I had a hell of a time mixing this on short notice. I wanted to use my ribbon mic because of its figure-8 pickup pattern, which made it better at rejecting room noise, and so I thought it would be better for the soft "intimate" nervous barely-there sung/spoken bits. But it puts out lower voltage. I was getting weird noise issues when tracking that I haven't yet figured out. So the input gain was low. I compressed and gained it up as far as I dared in the mix. It didn't help that my monitor speakers were failing; the subwoofer kept cutting out, and one channel was full of static. Stupid Chinese shit from Blue Sky. Stupid electrical noise in my cheap Oktava mic. Stupid not being able to hear my own tracks properly when I was mixing.<br /><br />My milieu. Huh. Still thinking that over.<br /><br /><i>2. I’m not one of those who feel that you can’t sing, because when you stay in places where you are strong, you get your plot points across really well. Your voice has an interesting breathy urgency that you often use good effects on a lot … uh… to good effect (duhhhh…)</i><br /><br />Well. Hmmm.<br /><br /><i>3. Sometimes you go for these hero moments vocally though and this KILLS you and any vocal credibility you have. This may undermine confidence in your singing and I think that would be a real shame. I feel like this happens to a few people with twitchy vocals so I hope that there are other people who try to do things that are not their strengths reading this, because if you build slow and steady on something it … uh … wins the race (duhhh…)</i><br /><br />Hmmm. And here I was really proud of pulling off something that to me at least vaguely resembled actual emotive, expressive, passionate singing in act 3, so that's frustrating. It's no fun to hear that the part of the song I thought was actually the best, others saw as a liability. And I don't know what to do if I'm afraid to fail, if that makes sense, because I'm not sure in what sense my vocals ever succeeded, so I don't know what I was doing right. And if it's only one or two types of things I do that sound OK, that's kind of boring and I would hate to be stuck only doing those things, but more so, if that makes any sense. I'd like to be able to say I was drunk when I wrote that last bit but really I'm stone cold sober, just confused and frustrated.<br /><br /><i>4. More of this thing I’m seeing that I’m thinking of as Inverted Rubato. It collapses a bit in the middle, technically – was it the structure? Sometimes you can be just SO arbitrary (pot … kettle. Eeek.) I don’t know. Really it is put together so epically, though. The CHORD PROGRESSION really makes this expansive as a work.</i><br /><br />I DO NOT KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS BECAUSE I HAVE NO MUSICAL TRAINING d'oh... so really I'm just glad I did at least something that was close enough to rubato that no one claimed I should be disqualified. But I was kind of proud of my epic wandering chords so that part is good at least; it seems like I did what I set out to do with all those chords.<br /><br /><i>5. I like the content of this a lot, so it drew me in. Things that are interesting and change enough to hold my attention can skate in other areas.</i><br /><br />Good? Not sure if I like the content, so that's still all a wash. Or, rather, I seem to have inadvertently written something resembling a deeply personal song when I did not really intend to be that revealing, and it was obfuscated and overlaid with various intellectualisms and artiness. But I do like the fact that a couple people told me that although they were unsure of the song at first, it sort of stuck in their heads, in a dream-like way.<br /><br /><i>6. This is very intellectual. I’m compelled, Paul. Compelled. This is an investment you should keep tinkering away at, perhaps adding some personnel. Many things you could do with this.</i><br /><br />Well, that sounds like encouragement. but I actually think "very intellectual" is not entirely a good thing for the piece. I wasn't setting out to write an avant-garde thing. Too "high concept." Maybe the parts could find their way into other songs, but probably I should put this one in a box for a while like my not-quite-successful Thomas Dolby pastiche.<br /><br /><i>Not intending to be mean, but this sounds like a weirdo singing a church song. Just couldn’t get into it.</i><br /><br />Not intending to be mean, but if you can't come up with something more specific and more constructive than that, I'm not sure you really should be a judge in this sort of thing.<br /><br />Really, there's not much I can do with that. Between writing and revising the lyrics and three long days of recording and several long nights of editing MIDI and tracking guitar bits, a final afternoon mixing, and working with the guy who mastered it, something like forty hours of work on my part and you've got "it sounds like a weirdo singing a church song?"<br /><br /><i>I like vocal doubling when it’s done well, but this isn’t it. The pitch is pretty inconsistent between the two vocal tracks and it gets a little distracting. The first 2/3 of the song get pretty repetitive as well and once rubato enters the picture the rhythm of the vocals in relation to the guitar gets all out of whack. The last 1/3 of the song has a really good melody, however, and the best lyrics of the piece. It gets bogged down a bit by more tempo changes that don’t quite work out, but it’s a stronger finish than I expected when the song started.</i><br /><br />Well, all I can say about the vocal doubling is that I did it as well as I could with what time I was able to take on it. When I listen to it in the final mix I only hear one or two "glitches" where they are noticeably off and to my ear most of it sounds pretty nicely doubled. And it sounds a lot better than some doubled parts done by people who are supposedly a lot more experienced at this. So I'm not sure what to think, exactly. I threw out a <i>lot</i> of takes for this.<br /><br />I'm not sure what is repetitive (what is repeating or nearly repeating? The melody? I tried to vary it; maybe I didn't succeed.)<br /><br />I'm happy to hear some praise for the melody in the final part. <i>Probably</i> what should have happened is that the last third, including the melody which I sort of discovered very late in the game, should have become the song. The difficulty with that is that the whole nightmare concept relies on the first two parts. So if I were rewriting it for myself, to be a different song free of the challenge, Act 3 might be a good place to start. Acts one and two maybe should be a different song entirely, or maybe they should just be conveniently erased from my hard drives...<br /><br /><i>I like the water sound effects. Hell, for this challenge I like sound effects in general. Good job putting us in the dream. Paul, as a singer, you're a formidable spoken-word performer. I sure wish you'd stick with the spoken word because you're AWESOME at it. So I bet you're not surprised that I like to imagine someone else singing here. There are parts where it's ok, notably in the beginning. But not Act 3. As far as the technical challenge goes, Common Lisp is wearing a belt and suspenders. The rubato is there, combined with accelerando and ritardo for good measure. I don't know if that was intentional or just covering all the bases. Either way, the bases are covered.</i><br /><br />I really appreciate the commentary about the sound effects and "putting us in the dream." Stick with the spoken word. As a singer, I'm a formidable spoken-word performer. Ha. You're a funny guy. At least, it would be funny if I were hearing it said about someone else. I've heard this kind of comment from you before and it's not that I think you're wrong; I understand what you're getting at. But there's already an MC Frontalot and an MC Lars and what-not and while I know I'm never going to sing like a Jonathan Coulton, I just am not really willing to accept that I can't find a voice that I can use to sing. Even if it's an odd voice and not a pretty voice; a Leonard Cohen voice, say. I mean, have you actually heard some of these American Idol singers? Jesus, I may need to go lie down. I think I just had a stroke.<br /><br />So part 3. It's the strongest melodically? It ends the song stronger than the reviewer expected initially? Or it's the part where my voice isn't OK? Honestly, I don't know. You know, I could use auto-tune. I could crank it up for the Cher effect and no one could accuse me of being off-key. It sounds unnatural to me. I can tell when my guitar is out of tune. In fact, I can tell with greater accuracy than my guitar tuner can. But my voice doesn't sound notably off-key to me in this song, and in particular in part 3. So I'm missing something. Is this supposed to be another dark night of the soul?<br /><br />I'm frustrated; I don't know if I'm going to be able to take any time off work at all, next week, to work on a round 2 song. Am I improving? Is there any endpoint in sight when I can say "that actually sounds good?" Is anyone who claims to like my singing really just being polite?<br /><br />Re: rubato. No, I still don't really know what rubato is, even after making my eyes glaze over on Wikipedia.<br /><br />This is supposed to be fun, right?<br /><br />What do I know? I'm just a weirdo singing a church song...Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-68834253286441409712012-01-28T09:01:00.000-08:002012-01-30T12:38:35.326-08:00Falling, a Nightmare in Three ActsSo as I mentioned earlier, my SpinTunes 4 round 1 song is a bit... unusual. It's almost five minutes long, in 3 "acts," with no chorus, with piano, fretless bass, environmental sounds, no percussion whatsoever. It's sort of artsy... like "Natural Science" on the album _Permanent Waves_, or something from a Pink Floyd album, or Thomas Dolby's "Mulu the Rain Forest," or an extended Kate Bush track from Aerial. Not exactly what I set out to make, but this is the song that asked me to make it...<br /><br />Here's the <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/falling-a-nightmare-in-three-acts">track on Bandcamp.</a><br /><br />This is the first time I've had someone else master one of my tracks. I sent Rich Wielgosz a .WAV file at 24-bit, 96KHz and he dripped it through some nice analog vacuum tubes and iron transformers (I think; I'm not entirely sure what he did) and sent it back mastered. Mastering involves compression, EQ, and maybe other tweaks to bring the file up to snuff as far as hearing as much musical detail as clearly as possible -- basically, it makes it sound louder, and clearer, and when it is done right it should do this without ruining what nuance is present in the dynamic range. He did a great job -- the remaining deficiencies in the audio are mine, not his. More info about Rich can be found <a href="http://richwielgosz.com/about.html">here</a><br /><br />My notes, the "song bio" if you will:<br /><br />So, the SpinTunes 4 Round 1 challenge was to write a song about "a childhood nightmare." I think some people might just be able to pick a nightmare and write about it, but I don't really remember any details about my childhood nightmares. I remember one very vaguely - I was being chased, and at the end I was falling, and when I landed I woke up with a violent muscle spasm, my heart pounding, soaked in sweat.<br /><br />I did experience a real-life nightmare, though. My parents divorced when I was three years old. My father left, and my mother moved my one-year-old brother and me from Seattle, Washtington, to Pennsylvania. I saw him rarely over the next ten years; for most of that time, he was only an occasional letter or voice on the phone. My mother's father became a sort of surrogate father for me, and role model, but he died of cancer when I was ten years old.<br /><br />So, that's the material I've got to work with. With the original dream so vague, I'll need to "take it and turn it." What if I misunderstood the nightmare? What if I wasn't being chased at all, but I was chasing my father, and the nightmare is that I can't ever reach him, and fall? So this song is about that nightmare of separation, and waking up and realizing that it is not actually a dream.<br /><br />Maybe that's a lot to try and convey in a song, although there is probably a single word for it in German. But I hope it works in some sense.<br /><br />These lyric concept started with one very long and extremely fast first draft, although I have trimmed and revised it. I realized as I wrote it that it was actually a bit like _Green Eggs and Ham_ -- Dr. Seuss wrote that book with only fifty words, on a bet. Similarly, as I wrote this I realized that there seemed to be a special power in repeating a few words and phrases and varying them, almost as if it was the vocabulary of a child chanting a rhyme. In that context a truly consistent rhyme scheme also seemed somewhat unimportant.<br /><br />I had imagined a very dramatic song with a heavy metal-style guitar accompaniment, and I messed around with a grinding heavy-metal guitar sound, but when I tried singing it, the song started to come out much, much differently. So it's been a process of heavy revision. I've never tried a serious multi-track project that didn't have a fixed beats-per-minute count, or recorded instruments without a click track. To employ "rubato," part of the challenge, I had to be able to vary the tempo freely over the course of the song.<br /><br />To get pieces lined up I would play a piano sound with a guitar synthesizer, to produce a MIDI piano part, and then record bass and vocals to accompany that, part-by-part, in a very painstaking and time-consuming way, recording take after take, looping parts over and over in my headphones while recording in order to get a precise feel for the timing. There is very little use of the "flex" feature in Logic because I felt that it would be too tempting to spend hours and hours of my limited time tweaking parts rather than recording better takes.<br /><br />Some of the audio directly from the guitar synthesizer can be heard as a horn part. There's a MIDI piano, and a MIDI Turkish oud lute, and then my unusual Steinberger Synapse 5-string fretless bass. The guitar I use to trigger the guitar synth has a piezo and humbucking pickups as well, so it is possible to record the audio from the guitar synth, MIDI notes, and two different audio signals from the guitar all at the same time. Then of course these can go into different amp models and effects. In practice I only ever used two or three of these at once. For vocals I got out my ribbon microphone, which I haven't used in quite some time. The environmental sounds I recorded in 2008 in Grand Marais, Michigan.<br /><br />This challenge had its own challenges. I actually took three full days off of work, in order to give myself some time without distractions, and went into the studio like I usually go into my home office. But the extra time just seemed to encourage me to do something more ambitious, and there were plenty of distractions: our hot-water heater failed, and the subwoofer for my studio monitors failed (it was replaced before due to a design defect). Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, I used Logic heavily for days and days without any of the usual crashes, and bizarre behavior was minimal. Apple seems to have Logic reasonably well debugged by now, at least the features I rely on. As I write this I'm winding up day 3, and I still need more time. There's never enough time! And so everthing winds up a compromise, full of flaws that make me grit my teeth, but hopefully good enough to make someone else like it; and maybe I'll even like it, once I can get some distance from it, and come back and listen with fresh ears.<br /><br />If I had to cite some specific influences for the style of the song, I'd pick out Peter Gabriel's song "Family Snapshot," as well as some Kate Bush sounds from her album _Aerial_. I've always loved the sound of fretless bass; for some of what I was trying to achieve, take a listen to "Mulu the Rain Forest" by Thomas Dolby.<br /><br />I've never written, or really spoken much, about my parents' divorce, or talked about it with a therapist. As I worked on this song I found myself going through an emotional tunnel, and feeling far more tense and upset than just the song deadline could account for. I see this process as somehow therapeutic, although I'm not sure the result will be very pleasant to listen to, and I don't think as some sort of great breakthrough. My father and I are on good terms now; he is still alive and living in California. But my understanding, and my lived experience, is that it just isn't possible to ever truly "heal" this sort of early loss, or replace those years of parenting; the experience reshapes a child's whole being. There's a great lyric by the band Everclear, from their song "Father of Mine" that really captures this:<br /><br /><pre>I will never be safe <br />I will never be sane <br />I will always be weird inside <br />I will always be lame</pre><br />If you don't know the lyrics, look them up; they are terrific. That song, though, is angry, and for me the feeling has never really been anger, although I've had a lot of people express anger on my behalf. It's more a sort of mourning.<br /><br />Paul R. Potts, aka Common Lisp<br />Saginaw, Michigan<br />25 January 2012<br /><br /><pre>Act One: The Dream <br /><br />Ambient nature sounds (wind) <br /><br />Spoken: <br /><br />"Sleep that knits up <br />the ravelled sleeve of care <br />The death of each day's life <br />Sore labour's bath; <br />Balm of hurt minds, <br />Great nature's second course, <br />Chief nourisher in life's feast." <br />- Shakespeare <br /><br />Note: guitar is down-tuned 2 half-steps, so I play these <br />chords on guitar as Dm, Gm, Dsus4, Gm, Am7, C and Bbmaj7. As heard it is in the key of C minor (relative minor to Eb)... I think. I'm not so great with the music theory. <br /><br />1a. <br />Cm <br />I've been here before <br />Fm Csus4 <br />I can't see where I'm going <br />Cm Fm <br />There's darkness behind me <br />Gm7 Bb Cm <br />Darkness ahead <br /><br />1b. <br />Cm Fm <br />There's a man in the shadows <br />Gm7 Fm <br />I can't see his face <br />Cm Fm <br />I thought he was chasing <br />Gm7 Bb <br />But it turns out I'm running <br /><br />1c. <br />Cm Fm <br />It turns out I'm chasing <br />Gm7 Bb <br />The man in the shadows <br />Cm Fm <br />But my legs are so tired <br />Gm7 Bb Cm <br />I know I'm not strong <br /><br />1d. <br />Csus4 Cm <br />Why won't he wait? <br />Bb Gm7 Abmaj7 <br />Did I do something wrong? <br />Cm Fm <br />I can't catch my breath. <br />Gm7 Bb Cm <br />Don't leave me alone. <br /><br />Spoken: <br /><br />To sleep, <br />perchance to Dream; <br />Ay, there's the rub, <br />For in that sleep of death, <br />what dreams may come, <br />When we have shuffled <br />off this mortal coil, <br />Must give us pause. <br />- Shakespeare <br /><br />Act Two: The Nightmare <br /><br />2a. <br />I will not cry <br />I'm running, not crying <br />I can't catch my breath <br />My lungs, they are aching <br /><br />2b. <br />The man in the shadows <br />Is gone and I'm calling <br />Not crying but screaming <br />Screaming and trying to <br /><br />2c. <br />Run and I'm slipping <br />The path it is crumbling <br />I'm screaming and gasping <br />Falling forever <br /><br />2d. <br />I scream in the silence <br />Too frightened for crying <br />Falling for ever and <br />Ever and falling <br /><br />2e. <br />I'm sitting bolt upright <br />And sweating and shaking <br />Down the hall mom is crying <br />Her heart must be breaking <br /><br />2f. <br />The man in the shadows is <br />Gone and I'll always be <br />Missing his love, I'll <br />always be aching <br /><br />Act Two: The Waking Dream <br /><br />Ambient nature sounds (beach) <br /><br />Instrumental break: shifts key to C major, I think. <br /><br />Cm Fm Csus4 Gm7 <br />Abmaj Gm F7 <br />Cm Fm Csus4 Gm7 <br />Abmaj7 Gm F7 <br />G7 Am7 E F <br />C <br /><br />3a. <br />F C <br />When I was small, so small <br />C G <br />I rode on your shoulders <br />F G <br />My hands felt your beard <br />C F <br />It was scratchy and warm <br />C <br />When I was small <br /><br />(Ambient sound: wind sounds return) <br /><br />3b. <br />F C <br />Now you are gone, gone, gone <br />F G <br />In the sun on the beach <br />F G <br />We were laughing and playing <br />F G <br />In the grass on the dunes <br />F G <br />You ran and I chased you <br />G F <br />On a day long ago <br />C <br />And then you were gone <br /><br />3c. <br />C G <br />Gone from your children <br />F G <br />Gone from your wife <br />C G <br />Gone from my brother <br />F G <br />Gone from our lives <br /><br />3d. <br />G <br />And though I've awakened <br />And though I've awakened <br />I'll always be aching <br />I'll always be aching <br />I'll always be runing <br />I'll always be runing <br />I'll always be chasing <br />I'll always be chasing <br />I'll always be falling <br />I'll always be falling <br /><br />Spoken: <br /><br />All men whilst they are awake <br />are in one common world: <br />but each of them, when he is <br />asleep, is in a world of his own. <br />- Plutarch</pre>Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-10620750411481831762012-01-21T14:01:00.000-08:002012-01-21T14:03:00.778-08:00Spintunes 4I'm participating in the <a href="http://spintunes.blogspot.com/">SpinTunes 4</a> songwriting challenge. My round 1 song is due January 29th. My intent is to post "song bio" material here as I'm able. Last time, I had to drop, because real life was just too crazy to allow me any free time at all to work on a sing. I'm trying to make things happen differently this time, but whether I'll really be able to do this or not remains a bit unclear. Stay tuned. Song Fu is also running again, but in a very different form than it did before. I was considering trying to get a song done for Song Fu's "bioluminescence" challenge as well, but I just don't think I can get both done.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-37488995659443929652011-11-22T07:03:00.001-08:002011-11-22T08:00:04.403-08:00Say That We'll Be NemesesI've been falling behind again! I haven't posted anything here in quite a while. I have been playing guitar, but not as regularly as I'd like.<br /><br />It was a hell of a summer and fall and we're heading into a holiday season, and what will likely be a harsh winter. Our home gets quite cold, and to avoid thousand-dollar heating bills we are keeping the temperature set low, and supplement with some small space heaters, wool socks, long underwear, and hats. I typically wear fingerless gloves I made by cutting the fingers off of knit glove liners. It can become difficult to play guitar with cold fingers, and we've been dealing with a string of minor but annoying viral infections that make my singing voice even worse than usual. It's time to seal up the windows, get the humidifiers going, and put all the acoustic guitars in one room with a humidifier going, to make sure they will make it through another winter without needless shrinking or even cracking.<br /><br />Anyway, you may have heard that Jonathan Coulton released a new album, and since he is sort of an unofficial, unknowing guitar teacher of mine, there's new material to learn, and with each song I learn, I get a little better at accompaniment playing. His song "Nemeses" is short and sweet, but there's quite a bit to work with, in addition to an extremely clever lyric.<br /><br />For my starting point I'm taking his more-or-less live <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX2eEICejB0">video version</a>, which is simpler than the album version. It's pretty clearly written around a guitar riff. The chords don't involve any particularly difficult fingerings; it's sort of an "easy intermediate" song in that respect. But it's fast, and the strumming hand is very active. Note that in the chorus as he plays the chord "walk up" the neck he's heavily syncopating the guitar line (hitting upstrokes on the offbeats).<br /><br />It's also not so easy to sing along with, in that the accompaniment is often changing out from under the sung melody line in challenging ways; listen especially carefully to the way the guitar hammers on underneath the bridge lyrics, "The hidden blade, when you pretend that you don't even know my name -- well played." That's not so easy to sing and play, and will require some careful practice.<br /><br />In the official video Coulton is singing harmony on almost every word, while hammering out the guitar part, which blows my mind just a little, with John Roderick on iPhone handling the melody. The song is in a bad key for my vocal range (I think it is in E, although it almost never lands on an E major chord), but given the way it is arranged around open strings, transposing it might not be so easy, unless you just wanted to down-tune a to D, or capo it up to G (I might try that, and sing the melody an octave lower).<br /><br />It has a lot of very "acoustic-y" half-open chords: chord structures that are not in first position, and in fact move right up the neck, but feature open strings. To play it cleanly, which I don't do all that well yet, you have to do some careful muting, and make sure you are not hitting all six strings when you aren't supposed to, and that they aren't ringing accidentally. I use a combination of palm muting on the main riff, muting with unused left-hand fingers, and for some of those half-open walk-ups, wrapping my thumb around the neck to mute the E string (although I'm not very good or consistent about my muting yet).<br /><br />For this to sound right, your guitar must be very precisely in tune. But not just in tune -- the intonation must be very accurate; if it isn't, it might sound right on an open C major, but a half-open chord well up the neck will sound off, or vice-versa, and the opening riff, which uses the open E string combined with the A string fingered way up the neck, will inevitably sound out of tune. This is also one of those interesting cases where, when you learn to trust your ear a bit, you might finding yourself bending the strings just a bit on the fly, to bring certain fingerings into sonority.<br /><br />I recorded a <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/nemeses-acoustic-guitar">doubled acoustic part</a>, and made it into a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HElj4G8GUgQ">karaoke video</a> for YouTube. It's not too bad, and I especially like the way the doubled guitar sounds, although there are a few spots where my muting isn't perfect. I don't play the rhythm <i>exactly</i> like the estimable Mr. Coulton does; I'm still polishing it. And I accidentally left out a repeat of the opening riff between the bridge and the third chorus. Oops. I'll re-record it when I get a chance, and perhaps get the muting better and the rhythm closer to the live version.<br /><br />Oh, there's just one more thing -- my own <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n5iiq6BgAs">live cover</a>. My singing is pretty bad in this, and my playing kind of rough, in part because Joshua was grabbing at my strings and would not sit still, but I thought it was still cute. And I really need a better webcam; the frame rate and audio synchronization I am getting out of the Blue Eyeball running into an Intel Mac Mini just doesn't cut it.<br /><br />You can find Suuuupaadave's fantastic transcription <a href="http://www.jonathancoulton.com/wiki/Nemeses/Tabs">here</a>. Note that he also produced an instructional video, which is incredibly helpful.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-29742283564171878942011-06-29T20:31:00.000-07:002011-06-30T09:49:17.580-07:00A Little Instrumental: Different StringsI had a few quiet hours this evening while my wife and children were out, and so I recorded <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/different-strings-instrumental">this</a>.<br /><br />It's an instrumental version of the Rush song "Different Strings," from the <i>Permanent Waves</i> album. <i>Permanent Waves</i> is the less-famous cousin of its successor, <i>Moving Pictures</i>. Where <i>Moving Pictures</i> is more coherent and polished, the songs on <i>Permanent Waves</i> are a bit more varied, from the big rock anthem of "The Spirit of Radio" to the epic prog-rock "Natural Science" -- but there is also "Different Strings." It's an unusual track for Rush, a soft and minor ballad, with piano, and a slower feel; it's in a lower vocal range. It also features one of the loveliest chord progressions I've ever heard. I recorded this in an attempt to capture the feel of that progression from the original song. It isn't a complete song; there's no vocal; it isn't perfect, as there are some timing gaffes -- but I think I did what I set out to do.<br /><br />There's a book I own called <i>Guitar Techniques of Rush</i> -- it seems to be long out-of-print and copies scarce, but it's great, and contains a perfect transcription of Lifeson's solo called "Broon's Bane," which is on <i>Exit, Stage Left</i>. The book's claim to fame is that it features transcriptions "prepared under the supervision of Alex Lifeson." The transcriptions are great. They are not the overly fussy, often obsessively detailed, yet often inaccurate, transcriptions you find in tab books; they are structured by and for actual musicians. They don't show you every note of every overdubbed track, but they show the basic parts in extremely accurate tab and notes. I've been struggling a bit with this song, particularly a couple of chord positions that are hard on my hands (I have relatively small hands).<br /><br />I recorded this using my Godin nylon-string SA guitar, one of the models with the narrow neck, and my Adamas 12-string acoustic. The bass is my Steinberger XP bass from 1985. All the instruments are run into a Radial JDV direct box, then to an Apogee Ensemble, and put together in Logic using Izotope Alloy and Ozone, and I think that's about it. The play-throughs are pretty rough. I had to chop up and edit the nylon string guitar far more than I would have liked, but I'm working on it. The 12-string is buzzing here and there because my left hand was too fatigued to get a good grip. Oh well. I gauge my progress, sometimes, by recording.<br /><br />Note that the original song is copyrighted and so I am probably breaking all kinds of laws. This is why I normally record only Creative Commons-licensed material... I just don't want to deal with trying to record covers of copyrighted material. It's just too fraught with peril, especially after recent incidents in which someone used our public Wi-Fi and gained me a DMCA warning letter from my ISP. Sigh.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-36351937932069056512011-06-22T21:14:00.000-07:002011-06-23T07:45:00.374-07:00The Start of Songwriting SeasonSo life has been busy. Crazy busy. We had a new baby. That's kid number five. I've been working crazy hours for the day job. I took only one day off for the birth of the new baby because I was working on such a critical deadline, that is all I felt I could spare. We've been trying to keep up with a house we're barely getting used to; we haven't even finished unpacking. Money is tight; things keep popping up to derail my plans, like car breakdowns. Part of our back fence collapsed due to the blizzards. The kids keep damaging stuff I wouldn't have even imagined they could possibly break, like tearing wallpaper off the walls, plugging our footing drains and flooding the basement with the garden hose, peeing in my shoes, or ripping keys off a keyboard. Our two-year-old is really a handful.<br /><br />Et cetera, et cetera, Peter Cetera even.<br /><br />Many days go by where it wasn't even really a question to get some quiet time for recording. I've been fortunate to get any time to practice guitar at all.<br /><br />In the midst of all this I made the decision to sign up for the SpinTunes songwriting contest again, because it has been so valuable to me to have this incentive and occasion and support group. It's been invaluable, really.<br /><br />The first challenge was announced 09 June 2011 and was due the evening of June 19th. The challenge was to "write a happy song about death." I thought I'd certainly be able to find a few hours during that week. I had been working a lot of overtime for the previous ten weeks or so, and was working very hard to hit a second deadline. If I had hit it, I would have tried to take three work days off in comp time. It was going to take me practically a full day just to get the office and studio cleaned up enough to work in there, leaving me a couple of full days to record a song. I had managed to get a simple lyric written and had a couple of very rough ideas.<br /><br />That didn't pan out; I didn't get my build working, due to both my bugs and other people's bugs; I had to do two all-nighters; I had to travel to Lansing twice.<br /><br />On Saturday (the day before the deadline) I blocked out about four hours. I thought that might be enough to record a sketchy demo. What happened instead was that my Apogee Ensemble went crazy. It had been behaving in a degraded manner. The week before it would occasionally reset itself, or start spitting bursts of ear-splitting noise through the speakers. But this was worse; Logic was locking up and crashing; the software meters wouldn't show any input data; the controls in the Ensemble control panel inside Logic showed crazy levels, like -454 dB. Apple's Audio MIDI Setup application was locking up and crashing; the Apogee Maestro application wouldn't talk to the Ensemble; I was seeing a non-stop string of errors in the Console. I reinstalled its firmware, and reinstalled its drivers, and rebooted. In this manner I managed to use up my entire time window in frustration. Apogee tech support is not available on weekends.<br /><br />I thought that it was likely my Ensemble had fried itself in the extreme heat in the studio -- early in June we had a crazy heat wave and it was baking in there. I'm fortunate I didn't lose a hard drive. Our central air conditioning just doesn't get up there, apparently; we have to figure out how to improve the airflow. It's quite an old house, and many of the vents that we ought to be able to open or close can't actually be adjusted. The whole system needs some attention from professionals.<br /><br />So I went for a walk with my Sony PCM-D1 digital recorder and recorded <a href="http://generalpurposepodcast.blogspot.com/2011/06/gpp-051-spintunes-epic-fail.html">this podcast episode</a>. I put that together later in the evening on the Mac Mini in the family room. Sunday was booked solid, with plans to have guests over, and a big backlog of basic chores I needed to catch up on, like grocery shopping. I pretty much had to announce I was going to be eliminated in round 1 by forfeit. It wasn't a good feeling. I knew that I had done everything I could, but still, it felt like establishing a work/life balance is what I had failed at, not just missing a deadline.<br /><br />I put in some more work time and managed to get my code debugged. I was not working at peak efficiency and making dumb mistakes due to simple overwork and lack of sleep. Yesterday I got permission to take those three days off as comp time, a week late. And so the plan was to try to do what I had wanted to do a week ago.<br /><br />Today I started by getting on the tech support chat with Apogee to see if I could get an RMA# for my Ensemble. The plan was to remove the Edirol FA-66 from the downstairs computer and bring it upstairs. I wasn't sure I'd be able to afford the out-of-warranty repairs for the Ensemble, and that was making me nervous. That box cost almost $2,000. If I had to shelve it because I couldn't afford to fix it, that would be a lot of money tied up in something I couldn't even sell. My head became filled with backup plans -- could I pay enough to have it fixed, then sell it on eBay, and track down an older Rosetta 200 with a PCI card to use instead as a simpler but perhaps more reliable and higher-quality setup? But the Apogee support person asked me to try uninstalling the Ensemble driver completely using a separate utility, then reinstalling it, not just running the installer again.<br /><br />I thought I was just going through the motions to try to prove that the device was exhibiting a hardware failure. But for reasons not entirely clear to me, that worked. I'm not sure just what might have happened to the existing driver, but there it is; if you have an Ensemble, and it starts misbehaving, give that a try. Years ago I wrote a MacOS X IOKit audio driver, so you'd think I'd be able to diagnose a problem like this myself, but no -- it really seemed to me like it was very likely to be a hardware failure.<br /><br />I've got a ventilation fan in the office bathroom window, pulling some cool air from the rest of the house, and that helps a bit. The plan is to get a portable air conditioner that vents to the window as soon as I can. Of course, if I'm going to record vocals, I have to shut everything off, and the heat builds up pretty quickly.<br /><br />I often start to feel like I'm failing to do creative work for various reasons -- due to my day job, or due to the family. That mindset tends to lead me into thinking of my day job and my family as <i>problems</i>. That's a painful over-simplification. I didn't quit my day job like Jonathan Coulton, to produce songs. I didn't, and still don't, have the performance and songwriting and recording experience that had gotten him to that point yet. My life is not his life. I'm supporting a family of seven. My wife is a stay-at-home mom and we chose that arrangement.<br /><br />Merlin Mann likes to ask the rhetorical question "what couldn't you ship?" He's asking people in business, particularly in software, to ask themselves how and why they've failed, and to address the root causes honestly. He talks about people who never ship anything -- who think they have big ideas for software projects, or writing projects, or music projects, but who are too busy, who have too many other priorities, and a lot to juggle, but still have time to watch TV every night, and don't even consider that to be negotiable.<br /><br />I've shipped a hell of a lot. My entertainment time is highly negotiable. In the last ten weeks or so I negotiated away a lot of things, including a great deal of sleep and a great deal of time with my family. I wrote a server, in about five thousand lines of C++, to a rapidly changing spec, without the ability to debug it on the hardware platform it was designed to run on at all. It features three hierarchical state machines, a dozen threads, several message queues, and something like 70 methods. We shipped that (well, version 1.0 at least; there will no doubt be more features, more bugs, more maintenance).<br /><br />I also completed a substantial revision to a piece of DSP code written in C. In this revision, through some simplifying and refactoring of a complicated piece of state machine code I managed to add features while removing almost 500 lines of code, or about 10% of the total program. I struggled for a few days with dumb bugs (most bugs turn out to be dumb, but occasionally I run into a bug that is truly fiendish). My boss happened to have possession of the debugger that I might have used to catch bugs right on the hardware, and it wasn't available for me to use this time, so debugging this involved some gritted teeth and a helpful co-worker with fresh eyes who read the code with me. I finally managed to extract the last obvious bug with the help of a separate test bench program, written in Visual C++, that allowed me to exercise most of the features of the program in an environment with a source-level debugger and the ability to log exactly what is happening. So that's shipped. My weekend was almost relaxing after over two months of this.<br /><br />So I do ship, but the problem is that I'm often not able to ship what I'd most like to ship, and not able to work steadily on the projects I'd most likely to work on -- my creative projects. The creative projects have to fit into the cracks and between the teeth of the gears, without actually jamming them. That can be tricky. They're a luxury and yet I'm considering them to be more and more of a necessity as I get more burned out on this kind of work, and wonder how much longer I can keep doing this as a career. It seems now that there is not likely to be an upgrade path, if that makes sense.<br /><br />So, with all that as prologue, today I recorded a song. I started with the snare drum that I was unable to record last week. It came out better than I expected. I used my matched pair of Rode NT-5 microphones in an X-Y pattern. With such a loud sound source, the exhaust fan in the other room didn't really matter much, so I left it on. I don't really know how to play drums, but I've manage to sort of teach myself just a <i>tiny</i> bit of stick work on a snare. That actually started with playing upside-down food storage buckets as drums during protest marches, particularly marching in solidarity with striking Borders bookstore workers in 2003.<br /><br />I also recorded three improvised guitar parts on my Adamas 12-string, into the Radial JDV direct box, and then into the Ensemble. I put the capo on the fifth fret to make it sound a bit like a mandolin. It did not turn out at all like I had heard it in my head last week. I had been imagining something upbeat and Celtic-sounding, like a reel, with a dance-like beat. It didn't sound much like that -- it sounded minor and Middle Eastern. But I was trying to do a one-day wonder, so I had to press on.<br /><br />I shut off the fans, improvised a vocal melody to my lyrics, recorded a few takes of that to get a reasonably clean one, and then did a few more takes to double it. I sang into the Oktava MK-219 at close range without a pop filter and it didn't seem like it needed one. I used Alloy with various presets on each channel. Now it definitely wasn't Celtic <i>per se</i>. Instead of a reel, it came out more like a dirge, even with the basic rhythm at 130 bpm. The combination of a fast beat with a very slow-moving vocal is odd. Still, like all my songs I at least like how <i>bits</i> of it came out.<br /><br />I decided to ship it anyway. Sometimes you have to get a not-so-good song out of your system so you can listen to it and think it over and perhaps learn something from the attempt and try again, or just move on to something different. I haven't and written recorded very many complete original songs yet; this is number six, or thereabouts. If I get to a dozen I'll start to feel like I'm beginning to accumulate real experience at this.<br /><br />I'd like to buy a copy of Nectar, the new vocal processing plugin from Izotope, since I really like Izotope's audio-processing tools, but that will have to wait. I have to remind myself that the right plug-ins might -- emphasis on the <i>might</i> -- help me to tweak a vocal found until I like it more, but no matter what microphone or plug-in I use, it isn't going to be work miracles on my vocal performance. I enjoy the sound of heavily processed audio tracks, even putting things like ring modulation or spinning speaker effects on vocals, but a lot of folks are a little more basic in their approach.<br /><br />Merlin Mann would probably ask me whether that is really going to keep me from "shipping" -- from completing the project. The answer is no. The presumed-broken Ensemble consumed some of my valuable time, but it didn't keep me from shipping either. In fact, it seems that there isn't much that will.<br /><br />The song, Today is Not That Day, can be found on Bandcamp <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/today-is-not-that-day-version-1-late-shadow">here</a>. It's not great. I'm not quite sure what I think of it yet. It always takes me a while to figure that out. I'm calling this Version 1 because, depending on what happens tomorrow and Friday, there's a good chance I'll record another version. While I was recording today I shot some video of the takes I put in the song, so maybe tomorrow I'll throw together a quick video. Goodnight all!Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-88852779816122883842011-04-27T09:36:00.000-07:002011-04-27T09:49:05.140-07:00The Right Leg Rest at Long Last!I finally came across an eBay seller who was selling an original Steinberger USA leg rest. My 1985 XP bass now has the correct leg rest. Yay!<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zFNeURaAka0/TbhF-N7ooDI/AAAAAAAACB8/EqKl5MqfYHs/s1600/steinberger_bass_leg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="240" width="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zFNeURaAka0/TbhF-N7ooDI/AAAAAAAACB8/EqKl5MqfYHs/s320/steinberger_bass_leg.jpg" /></a></div>I'm going to try to be even more careful with it this time. These parts are just incredibly scarce and I'm all too aware that a young child can do a lot of damage in just a brief moment of inattention.<br /><br />It came with aluminum inserts (not needed) and 7/16th Filister-head machine screws (pretty exotic and hard to find). Note, _machine_ screws, even though they are going into solid maple. They went in without too much difficulty, although a little flake of paint came off. But fortunately that spot is covered by the leg rest mount itself.<br /><br />The main difference between these originals and the later ones used in the Spirits and Gibson-produced instruments seems to be the way the holes are drilled. The originals have a deeper carved-out hole that allows the entire head of the Filister screw to sit flush.<br /><br />You can see an entry I wrote about the difficulties in finding and repairing these guitars here, <a href="http://geekversusguitar.blogspot.com/2010/10/steinberger-parts-dilemma.html">The Steinberger Parts Dilemma</a>. Here's a bit about the <a href="http://geekversusguitar.blogspot.com/2010/02/guitar-pron-11-steinberger-xp-bass.html">XP Bass</a>. I am still hoping to one day get my hands on a matching XP guitar (not a Trans-Trem model, though; that's another parts nightmare I don't even want to contemplate!)Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-30670167992239554292011-03-29T22:27:00.000-07:002011-05-31T20:06:55.045-07:00A Squier Super-Sonic Wiring DiagramI had a request on YouTube for a wiring diagram for the Squier Super-Sonic. It just so happened that I had one I had made myself a while back lying on the floor of my extremely cluttered office, and had been stepping over it for weeks, each time thinking, "you know, I should scan that in case someone might find it useful, and then I can recycle the original." So here is a good excuse to finally get that done!<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4KCDUI04mEM/TZK2ySgRAsI/AAAAAAAACBU/VpqXJF_TaAQ/s1600/supersonic_wiring.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="395" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4KCDUI04mEM/TZK2ySgRAsI/AAAAAAAACBU/VpqXJF_TaAQ/s400/supersonic_wiring.png" width="400" /></a></div><br />Anyway, there it is. Click for a larger version. I hope this is clear enough. The Super-Sonic is a bit odd: it has two humbuckers, a 3-way switch (neck, bridge, or both pickups), and two volume controls, but no tone controls. The volume knobs are in the positions opposite to the ones you might expect: the one closer to the bridge pickup controls the neck pickup, and vice-versa. If you don't like this, it ought to be a pretty simple matter to open up the control cavity and swap the two pots on the control plate (and that should be an easily reversible change if someone wants to put them back to the original "backwards" arrangement).<br /><br />Anyway, the basic wiring idea is that the jack and the pots each have one two-conductor wire running to the toggle switch. At the toggle switch, all the shields go to the ground point and the other conductors go to the 3 other switch points. The jack has the shield ground attached to the inner (sleeve) conductor. The volume pots are wired like volume pots typically are wired, with a short bit of wire grounding the pot's 3rd connection point to a ground point on the pot shell itself, and the wires from the humbuckers and switch both connected to the first two connection points with their shields connected to that same ground point on the pot shell itself. It's not very complicated as guitar wiring scheme goes; I wouldn't want to have to diagram a Parker Fly with piezo and coil tap! Don't forget to connect the ground wire from the bridge to the first pot (the one that isn't next to the output jack). Don't worry, if you get a ground point wrong it will buzz terribly to let you know.<br /><br />Both pots are both 500KΩ. The original humbuckers both use two-conductor cables, although I think if you wanted to substitute one wired with 5 conductors there is a way to tie the conductors together; if I recall correctly, replacement pickups from (for example) Seymour Duncan come with instructions on how to do this.<br /><br />There are basically 5 wires in my Super-Sonics. Fortunately the body cavities are not super-small like on a Mustang, so there is a little room to work, and there is enough slack in the wires to wiggle things around. All 5 of these wires run through the hole between the control cavity and the pocket for the neck humbucker, so make sure they are threaded through there before you solder both ends. These guitars are not very well shielded and if you are doing one, you might consider shielding the cavity, although this tends to be more noticeable with single-coil pickups than with humbuckers. The original components aren't the best. The 3-way switch is a Korean part and an identical replacement is available from Allparts:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.allparts.com/Korean-Toggle-Switch-p/EP-4366-000.htm">http://www.allparts.com/Korean-Toggle-Switch-p/EP-4366-000.htm</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.allparts.com/Korean-Toggle-Switch-p/EP-4366-000.htm"></a> Note that many common toggle switches that would fit a Les Paul are too big to install without drilling. A short version of the Switchcraft 3-way <i>might</i> fit. If you replace the pots, which would probably improve the sound as the originals are pretty cheap, keep in mind that to fit the holes in the control plate you will need a mini pot. I don't have an exact part to recommend but I think if you look for "500K mini pot" on Allparts you should find some options.<br /><br />I'd like to replace the pots and switches but I've been putting off this project because I know my soldering skills aren't great. The last time I did this to a guitar, I screwed it up so badly that I had to get professional help anyway and ruined some switches. I might try again -- if I do, I'll take pictures and let you know how it goes!Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-78529025909953454812010-12-29T11:30:00.000-08:002011-03-01T10:42:35.876-08:002010 Roundup, Part 2: Travels with Joe (and Now Featuring Denise Too!)I would be remiss if I did not take some effort to specially thank the people who collaborated with me. Since I didn't do any kind of real attempt to document all this at the end of 2009, to explain it all, I'm going to have to go back into 2009 to play catch-up, so bear with me.<br /><br />I may not correctly recall all the details, but I think I first became aware of Joe "Covenant" Lamb when I was working on "Skullcrusher Mountain" with the Mandelbrot Set virtual cover band, a collection of folks who met each other in the forums on <a href="http://jonathancoulton.com/">Jonathan Coulton's Web Site</a>. My kind thanks to all the Mandelbrot Set folks for collaborating -- that was a lot of fun!<br /><br />I was working on tracks and a mix for "Skullcrusher Mountain" and Joe did both a spoken-word and sung version, and also submitted a vocal track sung by his daughter, Charlotte. I was editing and mixing this huge pile of tracks, and it was a big challenge for me, as I was just barely beginning to learn how to edit, EQ, mix, and master. Joe was very patient with advice and tips and steady encouragement.<br /><br />The end result was not that great. The source tracks varied a lot in audio quality (independent of the quality of the performances, which tended to be pretty good), and there are a lot of things I would have done differently -- for example, it would have been better not to accept any source tracks in MP3 format, because of sound quality issues. But lossless files grow pretty big pretty quickly, and we wanted to conserve space on Box.net. But Jonathan Coulton did mention it <a href="http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2009/02/25/going-making/">in his blog</a>&nbsp;and that encouragement helped me keep going, work on more covers, and eventually start entering songwriting contests myself. The Mandelbrot set did a couple more songs but seems to be on an enthusiasm hiatus, at least for now.<br /><br />Anyway, the mix that <i>I</i> finally declared "final" is my "Too Many Monkeys" mix. You can find versions elsewhere but to get the best audio quality you should download a lossless ALAC (Apple Lossless) or FLAC file from my Bancamp page <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/skullcrusher-mountain-too-many-monkeys-mix">here</a>. In true open-source fashion Joe made his own mix, which he prefers, and uses on his streaming JoeCasts, and you can find that one <a href="http://joecovenant.bandcamp.com/track/skullcrusher-mountain">here</a>.<br /><br />More recently, I assembled a much different mix, in which I attempt to showcase a blend of all the originally submitted vocal tracks, <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/skullcrusher-mountain-voices-that-control-me-mix">here</a>. But my personal favorite, after all that effort put into mixing vocals, is actually my updated <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/skullcrusher-mountain-harmless-enough-instrumental-mix">instrumental mix</a>. Somehow it just seems easier to get <i>instruments</i> played across countries and continents and time zones to "cohere" a little more easily than singers.<br /><br />There are some more <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/album/the-mandelbrot-set-mixes">Mandelbrot Set mixes</a>&nbsp;on my Bandcamp page. The tracks I've assembled there are ones that I worked on; there are others out there. See the track notes. My personal favorite of these is my own instrumental mix of <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/album/the-mandelbrot-set-mixes">Creepy Doll</a>.<br /><br />Anyway, in late 2009, Song Fu 5 was running and Joe was in the running -- of course, he would eventually go on to win Song Fu 5 and gain the coveted title of Master of Song Fu!&nbsp;I wanted to collaborate with him and he was kind enough to risk his contest standing by letting me contribute guitar tracks. These contests have very short deadlines -- a week, or maybe a week and a couple of days, to finish a track, from the announcement of the challenge to completed mix.<br /><br />The first was the infamous <a href="http://joecovenant.bandcamp.com/track/mr-tom-furby-the-furby-catcher-moleman-no-297">Tom Furby</a>. This was stressful for me. If I recall correctly, Joe was not using a metronome in his original drafts, which I then had to try to match. This is possible, though tricky, if I'm matching a completed track; it's like playing live, but without being able to see the other musicians' movements. But it presents a real problem in editing. Without a click the tempo inevitably wanders a bit. Let's say that you then take track A and edit it, adding an extra chorus. Track B was synchronized to the original Track A with the wandering tempo. If you take a chunk of track B and try to repeat it over the added section, there will be an inevitable synchronization problem. You can hear this slight timing train wreck in the final song.<br /><br />Joe was also using a guitar tuner as his pitch reference, but his tuner had gotten accidentally set to "A=430," if I recall correctly, and so our tracks would not sound in tune with each other. I did multiple takes; I tuned my guitars to try to match Joe's tracks, but they always sounded out of tune, and then I had the problem of trying to record a 12-string in tune when I had been adjusting the pitch over and over. (They do not take kindly to this treatment; it's hard enough to get a 12-string guitar in tune once for a recording session). Add in the 6-string and ukulele. You can get a somewhat rhythm- and tuning-challenged sense of what I was trying to achieve, with a big triumphant sort-of-Celtic-sounding chorus of strings, <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/furby-guitars-raw-mix">here</a>. I was so pressed for recording time that, if I recall correctly, I recorded and uploaded all those parts in the space of about an hour, while my wife was parked outside with the kids in the car, and the car running, waiting for me to finish so we could go somewhere (most likely, it was to Saginaw).<br /><br />If Joe and I ever get an afternoon free in the same studio, I would love to re-record this song with him. Still, it won, warts and all, so I can't complain too much! And I learned a few things about how to do better collaboration in the future.<br /><br />We next collaborated on Joe's song <a href="http://joecovenant.bandcamp.com/track/ghoul-tide-ft-paul-r-potts">Ghoul Tide</a>. I was able to take a little more time with this. I'm pretty sure he synchronized his sleigh bells rhythm track to a metronome click this time. I made a MIDI track out of Joe's vocal which allowed me to synchronize parts more tightly and add synthetic instruments in Logic. The difficulties we had with this one were agreeing one the rhythms the guitar accompaniment should follow. A few minutes on Skype would have helped enormously, but due to some kind of technical problem we were pretty much unable to hear each other on Skype. We had to resort to ASCII art to try to indicate the syllables where the chord changes would fall and what the strum pattern would be like. I had the idea of doing the guitars as a sort of multi-tracked <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/ghoul-tide-unused-guitar-idea">smooth jazz</a> thing, but Joe didn't really latch on to that idea. The parts I finally sent him sounded more or less&nbsp;<a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/ghoul-tide-guitars">like this</a>&nbsp;-- a little rough, a little pressed for time, but at least they weren't notably out of tune! Joe used pretty much all of it, so I was very happy. If I recall correctly, my son Isaac is playing parts of the bass line while I'm playing some other parts.<br /><br />Let's see... somewhere along the way Joe was looking for people to sing on <a href="http://joecovenant.bandcamp.com/track/put-your-red-nose-on">this song</a>. So my daughter Veronica and I are in there.<br /><br />When I finally got the nerve up to enter Song Fu 6 myself, Joe was kind enough to assist me on my first complete original song, <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/polly-loves-the-rain-ft-joe-covenant-lamb">Polly Loves the Rain</a>. He did a great job, probably never suspecting that I was going to harmonize with him, the poor bastard. (I did not plan to originally; it just sort of came out while I was messing with the track). I can't sing nearly as well as he does, but still, I like the way it came out. There's a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_oReeYmyqE">video</a> which, if I recall correctly, has the original mix submitted for Song Fu, before I polished it up a little bit.<br /><br />And finally, for my original song <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/shermans-lament-featuring-duality-shadow">Sherman's Lament</a>, recorded as a shadow entry for SpinTunes 2 after I was eliminated, not only did Joe record vocals for me, but Denise Hudson, part of the duet with Joe known as Duality, recorded vocals, a Rhodes electric piano part, and some synthetic violins. I've been getting to know Denise and her music a little better and I'm really impressed with her <a href="http://denisehudson.bandcamp.com/">mad skills</a>. I have a vague plan to try covering her song "Spanish Lessons" early in the new year.<br /><br />Along the way, I've also sent Joe some guitar parts for some songs by Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm. They tend to be a little rough, since I have been using these songs as challenges to try to improve both my playing and recording technique (for example, for "I'm Your Moon," I wanted one complete take with no editing so I could have a corresponding YouTube video). He took my guitar part for <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/im-your-moon-backing-guitar">I'm Your Moon</a> and made a <a href="http://joecovenant.bandcamp.com/track/im-your-moon">full song out of it</a>. Here is <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/im-your-moon">my version</a>. He took my guitar part for "I Crush Everything," now available <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/i-crush-everything-guitar-only">here</a> and made this <a href="http://joecovenant.bandcamp.com/track/i-crush-everything-demo">cover</a>. Here is <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/i-crush-everything">another version with my own vocal</a> (it does not actually use the same guitar part; I've re-recorded it tuned down).&nbsp;He took my guitar part for Paul and Storm's song <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/live-guitar-only">Live</a> and made another <a href="http://joecovenant.bandcamp.com/track/live-a-paul-storm-cover">cover</a>. These are all a bit rough but playing covers, especially of songs with complex guitar parts, has been good practice.<br /><br />To apply a little more organization to these tracks, I now have a separate <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/album/parts-is-parts">album</a> for parts of Creative Commons-licensed songs recorded specifically to encourage collaboration. I'll be adding to that in 2011. Any requests?<br /><br />Oh, there's a little more we've recorded that I can't share with you. Joe and I both have a fondness for Rush. If you want to hear that, though, you'll have to hear us play live one day!<br /><br />There's probably something else I've forgotten. My apologies in advance! It's freezing in here and my brain is stuck in first gear.<br /><br />Anyway, my fondest thanks to the Mandelbrot Set folks, and to Joe, and to Denise, and to you too for listening and reading. Here's to lots more music in 2011!Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-24064983753903800162010-12-27T20:42:00.000-08:002010-12-28T18:54:20.968-08:002010 Roundup, Part 1: The Year in FingerpickingSo, we're winding up 2010 and I wanted to do a quick recap of what I've worked on.<br /><br />Sometime around fall or early winter 2009 I set out to focus on fingerpicking and discipline myself, but not in a mean, self-abusive way. It turns out that fingerpicking is really great for people like me who are a little obsessive-compulsive, especially in the dark winter months, and I was encouraged by some early progress. So, at the start of 2010 I decided to make it the "year of fingerpicking."<br /><br />I started with the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Art-Contemporary-Travis-Picking-Fingerpicking/dp/0936799005">The Art of Contemporary Travis Picking</a> by Mark Hanson. (It's a great place to start and I highly recommend it -- I have two more of his books as well, but have not gotten into them yet).<br /><br />I diddled a bit on songs like "Dust in the Wind," but really wanted to work on songs like Jonathan Coulton's "I Crush Everything." Fortunately, the song largely follows the same basic Travis picking patterns outlined in Hanson's book, and the combination of these exercises, the <a href="http://www.jonathancoulton.com/wiki/index.php/I_Crush_Everything/Tabs">tab</a>, and<br /><a href="http://jocolesson.blogspot.com/2008/05/lesson-week-13-i-crush-everything.html">Suuuupaadave's incredibly helpful lesson video</a>&nbsp;allowed me to make progress, which I documented in a series of quick practice videos (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTb72JN5dec">one</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENgr0ZPpK1Q">two</a>, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkBlXLeYWr4">three</a>). I did a more polished play-through of the doubled part, with some editing, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWCz8AIHJqY">in this video</a>. The <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/i-crush-everything-guitar">audio</a> is available here.<br /><br />Joe "Covenant" Lamb took this guitar part and added a lovely vocal track, creating his&nbsp;<a href="http://joecovenant.bandcamp.com/track/i-crush-everything-demo">demo</a>. On my to-do list is "re-record the guitar part now that I can play it more smoothly now," but inevitably it tends to be more fun to play live, work on a new challenge, or record something new than to re-record something old. I'll probably get to it when I get to the point where I can play it dramatically better than I did for that recording.<br /><br />Anyway, my ultimate goal is to be able to fingerpick this song while singing it live. I've done it for small audiences of family and friends. It is certainly easier to do without the camera or recorder running, which invariably makes me screw things up a bit, but I did manage to record this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXwER2Ks10o">live version</a>. I also discovered that I liked the sound of the song drop-tuned down a whole step, and recorded <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXwER2Ks10o">this version</a> which used double-tracked guitar and vocals, but a minimal number of takes and minimal number of edits, and was recorded on my Mac Mini setup with the Roland FA-66.<br /><br />Of all these, the best version is probably the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WVvEZ0mU_M">drop tuned one</a>. There's an <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/i-crush-everything">audio version</a>&nbsp;of the song with a fretless bass line; the bass line is not complete yet and will get revised when I get some more quiet time in the studio (and maybe some more practice on the fretless).<br /><br />When it came time to polish up my original song "Sherman's Lament," I naturally started playing the chords using Travis picking patterns, and the result can be seen <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roqzIGrD_Fk">here</a>&nbsp;(audio version <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/shermans-lament-live">here</a>).<br /><br />Just a few weeks ago, I decided to start working on Paul and Storm's song "Live," since it is also a finger-picked song. The patterns are a little step up in complexity; where in "I Crush Everything" the basic Travis patterns predominate, "Live" uses a lot of variants with little melody bits added. Fortunately, &nbsp;Suuuupaadave has made very detailed <a href="http://jocolesson.blogspot.com/2008/09/live-tab.html">tab</a> that covers all the patterns,&nbsp;and also done a two-part <a href="http://jocolesson.blogspot.com/2008/09/lesson-week-returns.html">video lesson</a>.<br /><br />So, I've got some practice videos again (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJK_zEA2Bn0">one</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uAf5hifaBM">two</a>, and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASs3n_MHswA">three</a>) showing my progress. I recorded the song on my nylon-string Godin guitar. My playing was a little rough yet, so I was not able to get a complete take, but I pieced together <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/live-solo-nylon-string-guitar">this recording</a>, again with the intent of polishing it up later (it's still a little rough, particularly in the bridge and right at the ending). But I mentioned it to Joe and just a couple of hours later he sent me <a href="http://joecovenant.bandcamp.com/track/live-a-paul-storm-cover">this</a>, with another gorgeous vocal part, so I thought "well, good enough for the time being!" and suggested he just upload it to his Bandcamp page. Paul and Storm even <a href="http://twitter.com/paulandstorm/status/18689910936444932">noticed</a> us on Twitter! (After I barraged them with several tweets, that is...) Their tweet read:<br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia; font-size: 29px; line-height: 36px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: black; font-family: Times;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; line-height: normal;"><br /></span></span>@</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia; font-size: 29px; line-height: 36px;"><a class="tweet-url username" href="http://twitter.com/JoeCovenant" rel="nofollow" style="color: #0084b4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">JoeCovenant</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia; font-size: 29px; line-height: 36px;">&nbsp;</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia; font-size: 29px; line-height: 36px;">[P] Got it. BTW, nice job on the "Live" cover, you and @</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia; font-size: 29px; line-height: 36px;"><a class="tweet-url username" href="http://twitter.com/paulrpotts" rel="nofollow" style="color: #0084b4; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none;">paulrpotts</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: georgia; font-size: 29px; line-height: 36px;">. :)</span><br /><br />Squee!<br /><br />So, there it is -- evidence of some real progress. Growing out and maintaining my right hand nails, with all the care then needed to avoid breaking them off, is a pain, but fingerpicking is really fun. I feel like I've discovered a secret way to sound like a much better guitarist than I am. Practicing finger-picking is relaxing and fits right along with my somewhat OCD personality. Playing the worked-out, polished parts is really fun, but what is even more fun is being able to take a basic song -- for example, a Christmas song, and improvising a finger-picked accompaniment for it, starting to come with not just the basic patterns, but melodic additions and variations on the fly. I did this for some small family get-togethers over the weekend of Christmas and got compliments on how cool it sounds. So for 2011 the plan is to continue: play, record, lather, rinse, repeat: not just finger-picking, but other styles. I just picked up a video of Merle Travis playing some of his famous songs, for inspiration. And my resolution, announced here: start doing it in front of an audience. (I'm getting nervous already!)<br /><br />Also resolved: to learn bass in a more systematic way; to continue to make progress on freless bass; to enter at least one more songwriting contest; to record at least six more original songs; to record more instructional videos.&nbsp;I'd also love to get my hands on an Ovation USA-made mandolin and start learning how to play one of those as well. And more ukulele. And maybe a slide guitar. And and and and!Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-9450904806355623402010-11-28T00:48:00.000-08:002011-02-12T20:57:49.383-08:00Sherman's Lament, Live Video and ChordsI've made a new video for my original song Sherman's Lament and deleted the earlier one.<br /><br />The new video can be found <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roqzIGrD_Fk">here</a>.<br /><br />A fully produced version of this song is available <a href="http://commonlisp.bandcamp.com/track/shermans-lament-featuring-duality-shadow">here</a>.<br /><br />Note that the chord changes I hit in the accompaniment on that version are slightly different, but not dramatically so.<br /><br />If you want to play it, this song should not be too challenging as long as you can quickly transition between basic chords and you can do a little Travis picking. There are a few little grace notes and fills here and there but they shouldn't be difficult (and I never manage to play them quite as I intended anyway; the solo guitar arrangement is still pretty new to me). The verses and choruses are all basically the same with the exception of the bridge and coda, so I have only put chord notation on the first verse.<br /><br />Please note that in the live video I am DOWN-TUNED (D to D) so if you want to play along with the video, you'll either have to down-tune or transpose the song. The guitar is my Babicz Identity Jumbo.<br /><br /><verbatim><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;">&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; C<br />I've spent my career teaching history<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; G<br />But my colleagues always mock me<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;G<br />My papers are rejected<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; C &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Em - F - G <br />My letters to the editor never selected <br /><br />&nbsp;&nbsp; C <br />My memories of those days are mostly a blur <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; G<br />Of crudely drawn animation<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;G <br />With our horn-rimmed glasses, we'd explore <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;C &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Em - F - G<br />The pasts of many nations <br /><br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;C <br />His bowtie he always kept impeccable <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;G<br />The puns were completely unacceptable <br />&nbsp;&nbsp;Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; G<br />I tell you this without much joy<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; G &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; C <br />For I'm no longer Peabody's boy <br /><br />CHORUS: <br /><br />&nbsp;&nbsp; F &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Em<br />My life has been so ordinary<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; G <br />Since the day he went away<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;G <br />Now it's been almost fifty years<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Am &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; C<br />And I am old and gray<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; F &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Em <br />I've never stopped believing<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; G <br />That he'll come back for me<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; G &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;C <br />My master, mentor, friend Mister Peabody <br /><br />VERSE 2: <br /><br />I followed Peabody's detailed instructions <br />To make sure our history functions <br />Fixing problems in our past <br />We righted wrongs and we had ourselves a blast <br /><br />When our show got cancelled, he took it really hard <br />We heard him howling in the yard <br />On that fateful day, he broke his chain <br />And with nothing but his big brain <br /><br />He trotted right through the door of his machine <br />We'd know where he went, but he broke the view screen <br />The government men took it away <br />Now how can I... get back... to yesterday? <br /><br />(REPEAT CHORUS) <br /><br />BRIDGE: <br /><br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Bdim<br />Cartoons can live forever <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Cmaj7<br />But not so human men<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Bdim <br />I'm hoping that he gets here soon <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Cmaj7<br />So I can see his fuzzy face again <br />Bdim<br />Maybe he traveled forward <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Cmaj7<br />And in some very different when <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; Bdim<br />Some clever future doctors <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Cmaj7<br />Can fix me and make me young again <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Bdim<br />Now night is fast approaching <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Cmaj7<br />But if we meet up one day <br />F &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;G &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Dm7 G C<br />We'll be dog and boy like it was yesterday <br /><br />VERSE 3: <br /><br />I had to pack up and go back to school <br />Which felt so very cruel <br />The history books all seemed strange <br />It's not nearly as fun when it can't be rearranged <br /><br />Me, I just got older, and I discovered girls <br />But they never seemed to like me <br />Maybe the dog tags put them off <br />Or maybe they saw me scratch a flea <br /><br />I never got married and I never had friends <br />I really hope this isn't how it ends <br />I hope my master won't forget me <br />And I'll make history with Mister Peabody <br /><br />(REPEAT CHORUS) <br /><br />CODA: <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;F &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Em<br />Now you might think I'm just confused <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Dm7 &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;G<br />And age has left me in a fog <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;Dm7<br />But I never minded playing second fiddle <br />&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; C<br />To a dog</span></verbatim>Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-48031939051218129152010-11-23T08:51:00.000-08:002010-11-23T12:05:20.782-08:00SpinTunes 2, Round 4 ReviewsI did not submit a shadow for this round, but as a contributor I was given the opportunity to submit a vote. So I'll just go ahead and review the entries. Since we're down to the finals, this time there are far more more shadows than officially competing songs (of which there are only four).<br /><br />The challenge was to write a song from the perspective of a character in a video game. The drawback of this, from my perspective, is that the song will assume that the listener has played a specific game, or is at least very familiar with it.<br /><br />I do like video games and I've played quite a few of them over the years, going back to home Pong and Motocross consoles, through the heyday of arcade games (my personal favorites included Ms. Pac Man, Tempest, Gyruss, Burger Time, Robotron 2084, Pole Position, Tron, and Reactor) and early Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore 64 games. Scott Adams Adventures, Flying Saucer, Pyramid, Asylum, the original T80 FS-1 Flight Simulator (loaded from cassette), Castle Wolfenstein... pretty much the entire Ultima series, including the Ultima Underworld games... M.U.L.E... Seven Cities of Gold... Root Beer <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W0ZQyOjyR8">Tapper</a>... I had a serious fondness for the Infocom series (are text adventures actually video games?)<br /><br />I don't play any MMPORGs, I've played very few modern PC games (I think that last one I played was Alone in the Dark), with the recent exception of Half-Life 2 since Steam was released for Mac. The last games I've completed were for the Nintendo 64 and GameCube -- Paper Mario and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I like (and still have) some of the more obscure Nintendo 64 games like Space Station: Silicon Valley, Rocket Robot on Wheels, Tonic Trouble, Conker's Bad Fur Day, Kirby: the Crystal Shards. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and The Ocarina of Time sucked up enormous amounts of my time almost a dozen years ago...I got pretty far along in Mario Sunshine and Pikmin for GameCube. I played some serious Pokemon games with my son.<br /><br />But my proudest moment was beating the evil duck jack-in-the-box boss in Donkey Kong 64 -- that was a hard, hard fight! Although I couldn't be bothered to finish the game -- it just seems to go on forever. Apparently it can take upwards of 100 hours or more to finish, at least if you're a perfectionist like me and want every point. And these days I hardly have enough time for even an unbroken hour of gaming, much less a hundred.<br /><br />I tend to prefer game console games to PC games and intermediate or advanced kid-oriented games, oriented around puzzles, platform jumping, or racing, to "adult" games. Back in the day I played a lot of Doom and Quake and other first-person shooters like Goldeneye, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Perfect Dark, and similar, but I've mostly lost my taste for first-person shooters as they've gotten increasingly realistic.<br /><br />So what were we talking about again? Oh, yeah, reviewing songs! All this is by way of saying that if you are considerably younger than I am, or you had different consoles than I had, or were a big PC gamer in a different decade, there's a good chance I know nothing at all about the game you're writing about. So how much "research" should I do in order to understand the context and try to judge your song as if I was familiar with the game? Well, as I'm not an official judge I'm not going to do very much. I'll be judging these songs mostly for how much fun I think they are to listen to and how well they stand up even if I haven't played the game.<br /><br />1. Zarni DeWet - The Bleeding Effect<br /><br />OK, so right off the bat I'm confronted with a song where, apparently, there's a hugely complex back-story described by paragraphs and paragraphs of text on the Bandcamp song page. Honestly, I get that these games can be very compelling and one can be really drawn in to the storylines -- I know this especially from the many nights I spent solving Infocom games "back in the day." (Did anyone else cry when the robot Floyd died in _Planetfall_?)<br /><br />But I'm not going to read all that if she can't be bothered to edit it down to a couple of paragraphs. Even if I managed to put it all together, it wouldn't have much emotional resonance. <br /><br />What I will say is that Zarni's vocal performance is gorgeous and impassioned here and I like the instrumentation. It does leave me feeling a little bit on the outside looking in, though, so I can't really rate this one as my favorite. It's too long for so few lyrics, for one thing. There's a long stretch of silence at the end of the track, too, which is a pretty big technical flaw.<br /><br />I listened to all these songs three or four times. I initially rated this one the lowest of the four, but now I've changed my mind and I rate it best of the four, mostly on the strength of the vocal performance. Isn't that weird? Basically, it's because as I listened to this album over and over, I found myself thinking "oh, cool, I get to listen to that song again!" Initially I thought that the storyline was a little too self-contained to the video game world, but as I listen to it I think the lyrics stand by themselves more than I initially gave it credit for. I think that was something she carefully worked at, and not accidental. It reminds me a little bit of the lost '80s band Quarterflash, with their song "Harden My Heart."<br /><br />Is that fair? Who knows?<br /><br />2. Mitchell Adam Johnson - In Another Castle<br /><br />This one is fabulous -- the instrumentation is fun and bouncy. Here we have a song that requires less R&D to understand; the whole Mario storyline is much more embedded in general pop culture. The video game sound effects work wonderfully in this track. We get a storyline told from the POV of Princess Peach. The lyrics are simply hilarious -- Princess Peach is supposed to be the carrot, but she's also the stick -- kind of an obnoxious tease, don't you think? The song captures that perfectly.<br /><br />It's a damned tight race, but I rate this second of the four.<br /><br />3. Rebecca Brickley - Where I Am<br /><br />The recording here is a little odd (a very hollow tone, especially on the vocals, and some strange distorted sizzle on the hi-hat). The intelligibility of the vocals suffers just slightly for that. I had to read the notes to determine who the song was about. It's Carmen Sandiego, which (I think) has sunk into popular culture enough to be recognizable. Am I over-reading it to think something else about Carmen Sandiego is being implied by the phrase "playing for the other team?"<br /><br />Nice swooping vocal performance, fun song, but it gets third place of the four. No, it's not really fair, and it doesn't reflect the fact that it's a fun song. It's just got slightly lower replay value for me, if that makes sense, and it's mostly because of the character of the recording. These songs are mostly really close to each other in quality so it's hard to decide.<br /><br />4. Chris Cogott - In Bright Falls<br /><br />I have no idea what this song is about without reading the notes. Oops, there's nothing about what the song is about. Who is Alan Wake? Huh. Google. Apparently it's the name of a game for the XBox platform, and a very recent one (released only five or six months ago). I've never played an XBox, and what with moving and working from home since May I have, in fact, been living under a rock, so it's no wonder I've never heard of it.<br /><br />The production is fantastic. It sounds very much like "Paperback Writer" and very much like Brian Wilson was involved in the production somehow. This one is definitely the best produced of the four, although it's a little loud and the overall EQ and compression situation grates slightly. It's a very tight decision but it gets last place, mostly because the lyrics don't really click with me. It's not fair. Or do I want to give it third? Or second? Dammit. No, last place. Sorry. I'm sorry about everything. I'm going to feel bad for the rest of the day now. Crap.<br /><br />Now, on to the shadows.<br /><br />5. Charlie McCarron - The Pac-Man Duet (Shadow)<br /><br />This is the funniest of the whole bunch. I think it is technically too short to meet the requirements, but it is absolutely-freakin'-hilarious. I'm hoping that Charlie's voice is electronically processed in some way. If he can sing like that without plug-ins then I'm both stunned and confused. And maybe slightly aroused. But mostly confused.<br /><br />6. Mark Humble - I'm Q-Bert, Babe (Shadow)<br /><br />I'm sad that this is a shadow. This is as good as the songs actually in competition this round. The integration of the video game sounds into the track, and the overall mix, are just great. Mark just seems like a music nerd after my own heart, perhaps a better producer than a performer. It's a little short, time-wise. Some of his rhymes are painful (what would _you_ rhyme with Q-Bert?) Still, really nice effort.<br /><br />7. Brian Gray - Hard to Get (Shadow)<br /><br />I think this pretty clearly about Donkey Kong, unless I've missed some games. The use of backing vocals is great and I like the bouncy keyboard track. I feel like if you're going to write a song about one of the classic platformers, it had better be bouncy, or you've failed to capture the humor and energy of the originals. This one does. The lyrics are funny and he came up with some excellent rhymes.<br /><br />8. Boffo Yux Dudes - Floating Away (Shadow)<br /><br />I'm not sure I get what game this is about. Who is Major Tom? The sound effects seem to be from Asteroids, if I'm not mistaken. Did the original Asteroids have some reference to the name of the avatar character actually piloting the spaceship? The song's a little hard to listen to with the layers of booming voice, but I like the slightly ethereal feel and the mournful lyrics. The vocal performance is actually pretty strong and actually feels like it wants to break out of the constraints of the "novelty song" it's stuck in.<br /><br />9. JoAnn Abbott - Go For the Eyes (Shadow)<br /><br />Again, I don't know what game this is referencing. The lyrics are funny but without context I'm not quite sure what is going on. The weird lyrics contrast oddly with the perky music and performance. I Googled "miniature giant space hamsters" so I guess this is from Baldur's Gate? But I've got no idea what that game is like.<br /><br />10. Boffo Yux Dudes - One Level Down (Shadow)<br /><br />I love the way the volume and beats per minute keep ratcheting up -- a perfect "form follows function" structure, and it completely captures the way the old Space Invaders game sped up and sped up until it became simply traumatic. Are video game songs the perfect niche for the talents of the Boffo Yux Dudes?<br /><br />11. David Ritter - Pitfall (Shadow)<br /><br />An ethereal, acoustic-guitar oriented song about Pitfall is very strange. Very pretty instrumentation and vocals though.<br /><br />12. Boffo Yux Dudes - Elf Shot the Food (Shadow)<br /><br />Wow, we have a third shadow from the Boffo Yux Dudes. This one is really funny and made me smile, even though I don't think I ever played the Gauntlet arcade game much.<br /><br />13. Caleb Hines - The Writing on the Wall (Shadow)<br /><br />Interesting -- actually a Caleb song, but sung by JoAnn. I have to confess that I've never actually played Portal, although of course as a Jonathan Coulton fan I know at least something of the storyline. The lyrics are funny. JoAnn doesn't seem terribly into what she is singing.<br /><br />14. Governing Dynamics - One Four One (Roach) (Shadow)<br /><br />I've never played any of the Call of Duty games so this one doesn't really resonate. Travis has gotten good at boiling storylines down to their lyrical essentials. This isn't one of his most compelling songs but like all his recent songs it grows on me the more I listen.<br /><br />15. Inverse T. Clown - I'm Tops (Shadow)<br /><br />After some Googling I think this must be from Mega Man 3 for the old Nintendo Entertainment System, which I confess I've never played. Inverse's sarcastic lyrical style works really well here in the "mouth" of a video game character and the all-electronic production works well for this as well. There's a harmony vocal that fits nicely in the track and makes me want to hear more layers of Inverse singing. This song works very well overall and it's not only one of the best shadows, but fairly competitive with the competing tracks.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-19517177218563266852010-11-21T21:49:00.000-08:002010-11-21T21:49:47.562-08:00Sherman's Lament (Acoustic Arrangement)I'm working on an acoustic arrangement for "Sherman's Lament." Here's a murky-looking <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjT884SI_HE">video</a> of a performance for no one (no one, that is, but you, the viewer) in my family room.<br /><br />Chords to follow shortly.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5850403001392456516.post-66689141051454305632010-11-17T21:56:00.000-08:002010-11-17T22:13:51.684-08:00SpinTunes 2, Round 3 ReviewsOK, I'm a bit behind reviewing these. They've already been judged, and all but four of the entires eliminated. But I'm still going to review them.<br /><br />The full album can be found <a href="http://spintown.bandcamp.com/album/spintunes-2-round-3">here</a>.<br /><br />Here are the <a href="http://spintunes.blogspot.com/2010/11/spintunes-2-round-3-totals.html">results</a>.<br /><br />I commented in the chat that I had mentioned in the previous rounds that I didn't envy the judges. For this round -- I really, really, really didn't envy the judges. These tracks are uniformly anywhere from pretty good to fantastic, and they had to pass four and eliminate eight of the twelve.<br /><br />1. Governing Dynamics - Los Alamos<br /><br />I have a confession to make. When I first saw pictures of Travis Norris, aka Governing Dynamics, I thought he was probably about twelve years old, and maybe in Junior High School. I did not really feel like I could connect with his music. I didn't like the way he recorded his guitars or the <i>style</i> of it. We didn't have the same influences. Somehow I didn't quite get it.<br /><br />How things change. Travis was born in 1983, so he's not yet 30. In related news, I'm old. My opinion of what he's doing has completely changed. This is a seriously great song. It's more-or-less in a late-90's grunge-tinged style. I had somehow developed the impression that Travis couldn't really play well, and that's why his guitar parts sounded a little sloppy and dragging. This song proves that I was completely mistaken. He's playing them exactly the way they are supposed to sound. They are layered, but not in a wall that is intended to hide sloppy playing. It's a clean, sweet wall of tone. <br /><br />The guitars on this song remind me, just a bit, of one of my favorite bands -- Gang of Four -- in that they are uncompromised and there is no concession to sweetness and pop. They don't sound like the Beatles. They're dark and deadpan. The vocals are gorgeous. The lyrics are great. He did indeed, as he put it, pull out all the stops.<br /><br />2. Inverse T. Clown - I Have a Leap<br /><br />This is pretty similar to what I've come to think of as a "standard" Inverse arrangement. The lyrics are about a Quantum Leap episode, imagined or otherwise, and a real historical event. It's clever and competent enough but it doesn't grab me. There's something again a little dry about the canned-sounding instrumentation.<br /><br />3. Charlie McCarron - Queen of Heart<br /><br />After his odd round 1 entry I was mostly baffled by Mr. McCarron's style of music. His round 2 entry I found much more promising and downright fascinating. This is a cool song. I wish I could play as many instruments as he seems to. The lyrics are understated and pretty.<br /><br />4. Ryan Ruff Smith - The Driver (Dallas, 1963)<br /><br />An oddly upbeat, melodic retelling of Kennedy's assassination over a finger-picked guitar and shaker, with a police scanner-style radio in the background. It's an odd choice. It works pretty well with the chorus lyric "as long as I keep driving, none of this is real." Gets me into the shocked mindset of the day. I'm still note entirely sure how I feel about this song.<br /><br />5. Edric Haleen - I Was There<br /><br />Edric's piano part here is a little darker, atmospheric, and dissonant. His vocal performance seems a bit odd, but when he doubles himself, it really takes off nicely. Could have run too long, but ends precisely when it should.<br /><br />6. Ross Durand - Ivan Vaughan<br /><br />Just a hint of an accent at work here that very effectively captures the idea of a friend of the Beatles. The guitar is pretty, the chorus is catchy, and it's nicely sung, but the lyrics seem just a bit short of ideas.<br /><br />7. Chris Cogott - Final Flight<br /><br />A wall of echoing guitar harmonics remind me of '80s psychedelic revival -- a beautiful production, and I appreciate that there is still a little dynamic range and the compression isn't flat-lined. Great guitar solo work.<br /><br />8. Mitchell Adam Johnson - Pictures of Love<br /><br />Another Beatles story -- this time about the breakup. Also just a bit psychedelic-revival. Beautiful guitars and a harpsichord sound in the background. Nicely produced. Songs like this remind me just how much I still have to learn about producing fully realized songs.<br /><br />9. Steve Durand - Cuban Missile Mambo<br /><br />This is truly the oddity of the competing entries. It would be hard to imagine a goofier song. Seriously -- Castro's barber? A mambo about one of the most frightening confrontations of the 20th century and the defining crisis of Kennedy's administration? Truly, Steve has balls of solid brass. Not entirely successful in tone, and the vocal performance is a little underwhelming, but quite funny.<br /><br />10/11. Rebecca Brickley - Oh Mercy<br /><br />For some reason Rebecca was not able to get the judges her final polished track in time, and so we have two versions. The "remix" version is polished and gorgeous, while the "judge's mix" is more demo-style, with some screwy compression and phasing going on, but they are the same song, and the demo is still pretty damned good, so I actually think the difference in production quality probably wasn't a large factor in the judging. These lyrics are just gorgeous. She's really imagined something cool here. The whole cadence of the song has a very cool martial, marching feel to it, although it's not quite coming from the percussion or the piano in isolation, but somehow more from the breathless style of the vocal performance. I'm so pleased to hear a song about an American war that isn't schmaltzy or cliched: the protagonist admits he "just wanted to make his poppa proud / he didn't much care what the war was about." And 'twas ever thus.<br /><br />12. Zarni DeWet - Eric<br /><br />This is a risky song. This got me into a debate with another listener, and I had to clarify what I meant by that -- the "risk" is simply that the listener won't really be able to go there, to empathize with the narrator and feel the emotional weight of the story, but will instead just scowl at the premise, and so not give it a fair shake. Are we ready for a song about Columbine told from the point of view of the mother of the shooter? Apparently, we are. This one made my spine tingle and it still does several listens later. It's just this side of pathos here and there, but it doesn't shy away the gut punch, and that works for me.<br /><br />13. Gweebol - She Said, As She Handed Him The Telephone<br /><br />The premise here is the historical oddity that Alexander Graham Bell's wife was apparently deaf. I love Gweebol's voice, but this song seems to meander a bit.<br /><br />14. Duality - Columbia (Shadow)<br /><br />The production sounds very similar to a number of other Joe "Covenant" Lamb songs and failed to entrance me. It's perhaps not his very finest vocal performance but it's way up there. More importantly, there's a new level of lyrical sophistication here. I didn't quite put the story together on the first listen. It's well worth a second (and third).<br /><br />15. David Ritter - Portal of Doom (Shadow)<br /><br />A bit of an oddity, the music is funky and jazzy, while the lyrics are dark and funny. Clever and nerdy -- "there's a frickin' black hole in the room." A bit fluffy, though, and ultimately a little forgettable.<br /><br />16. Duality - Historical Verity (Shadow)<br /><br />I don't claim to understand the whole context here. It's a funny song and I love the interplay between Joe and Denise's voices. There's something more serious going on, though, about the nature of war as seen from the level of the common man.<br /><br />17. JoAnn Abbott - Candle in the Dark (Shadow)<br /><br />I'm not sure JoAnn gets the difference between sentiment and sentimentality, but I could sum up my opinion on the matter by simply saying that there's actually no such thing as conservative art. Real art always subverts the dominant paradigm, tells the untold story. If it doesn't, it's not art, it's kitsch, like a painting of a fluffy kitten at a flea market or a flag airbrushed onto the side of an RV. It's expected. On the plus side, it's nice to hear Caleb's impressive keyboard work here.<br /><br />18. Duality - St. Andrew's (Shadow)<br /><br />A dark and minimalist song that shows us a side of Denise's vocal talents we don't hear nearly enough of. As I heard this in the online listening party, I went into a genuinely dark and frightened place! Denise, please let your demons out to play more often! Also: fantastic concept and lyrics.<br /><br />19. Common Lisp (featuring Duality) - Sherman's Lament (Shadow)<br /><br />Has it been long enough that I have enough distance to review my own song? Production first: there's some crackling on the transients that sounds awful. I'm not quite sure where it comes from. It seems to either be the transition from 24-bit to 16-bit, or the MP3 compression. I wish I knew how to get rid of that. Dither, no dither, limiter, etc.<br /><br />I may be over-compressed here. I never seem to get the mastering quite right.<br /><br />I guess I'm most proud of my lyrics. I think Joe and Denise did a good job with it, but somehow the smooth instrumentation and voices all together seem to lack energy. Too slow? The style of instrumentation just doesn't fit the concept?<br /><br />As Doctor Lindyke pointed out, the song doesn't quite meet the challenge because it doesn't point out a connection to an event in history. I also heard the message that folks didn't really like the samples. I could attempt a remix, I guess, but it will probably have to wait until I've gained yet more distance and can be a little more objective. I might try a a "folksier" recording that is just guitar and my vocal.<br /><br />I'm disappointed not to have more reviews; I've gotten almost no useful feedback on this song. My wife didn't really think much of it. I finally sang the whole thing to her a capella and she laughed at the intended places so I guess the lyrics ultimately did work for her, even if the whole mix did not.<br /><br />20. Duality - Triangle (Shadow)<br /><br />The most abstract, dark and dissonant thing I've ever heard from Denise. I don't quite know what to say about this track. It's nicely sung, but seems a little shy of lyrical content.<br /><br />Postscript<br /><br />So, it's Wednesday night and at this point it doesn't look like I'll be doing a shadow entry for round 4. These contests are hard on my family, and my mood and energy level have been sinking a bit into a usual late fall downturn as the days get shorter. Also, the round 4 challenge has almost entirely failed to inspire me with any ideas. I had one, but it required a piece of music software that resides on my iPod, which seems to be lost. So barring sudden inspiration, I'll be sitting this round out.<br /><br />I've really enjoyed SpinTunes. It's been great practice and great experience.<br /><br />That said, now that the final round will be arriving shortly, I feel like the playing field is barely clinging to life, as far as any sense that amateurs are involved. Rebecca Brickley's is the only survivor that sounds like an artist who might be still learning how to do this, rather than one who already has it entirely mastered and down to a routine. I guess it just reinforces my feeling that I don't really belong in this competition any more, which is a disappointing feeling -- and one I didn't experience in the my (brief) experience in the somewhat more freewheeling Song Fu. It reinforces the sense that I should have started doing this earlier and gotten more practice in.Paul Pottshttps://plus.google.com/111931884962855299890noreply@blogger.com12